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 back, this is episode 65 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. As we're approaching the end of the year, and I know I'm working on my goals and helping my clients work on their goals, I've been reflecting a lot about the idea of goal setting, , the idea of creating our lives very intentionally.
And for many years, the message I received and what I was aiming for is having it all. The idea of being the perfect mom, perfect businesswoman, perfect coach. Spend lots of time taking care of my body, prepping the right meals, going to the gym, being the good friend, being there for my family, all the things that we've been sold that that's what we need to do or that's where our happiness is but now I know that when we pursue having it all, what happens is that we end up very stressed, very tired, very overwhelmed.
Many years ago, I had a program that was in Spanish one of the exercises I would do with all the women who joined this program was to write, to describe what their brains presented as the perfect woman, the woman they thought they had to be. And we would end up laughing because there was so much in these pages that it was like physically impossible.
Going to the gym every day, meditating this number of hours, preparing beautiful lunchboxes for our kids, having the most amazing up-to-date, uh, wardrobe, being an executive, making this amount of money, all these things that if we counted the hours of the day, it was just impossible. So that's when I started questioning that.
What does it mean to have it all? The first thing I know is it doesn't mean to do it all. Doing it all leads to burnout. And I think that the best leaders don't do it all by themselves. They have team of people who are helping them to achieve their goals, and they know what they're the best at and they spend the most time doing that.
So anyway, the first idea I wanted to share with all of you is that. Pursuing, having it all is not a good recommendation or it's not a good way of living life because it really is gonna leave us exhausted, tired, unfulfilled, burned out, et cetera.
So if we're not trying to have it all, then what should we go for? I wanna read a little part from a book called regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware.
And in this book, just to give you context, Bronnie Ware was a nurse. She worked in palliative care for many years, and she got to be with people at the end of their lives. And during that time, people would tell her the things they regretted and she started writing it. And she started noticing that there were some themes, and that's what she put in the book.
But what I wanna do is not go into all of them, although it's good to look at them. So we don't have those regrets at the end of our lives. But I wanna read. The first one, and this is what she writes, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all.
When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams. Had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or choices they hadn't made. It is very important to try and honor at least some of your dreams along the way.
From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom. Very few realize until day no longer have it. So as a coach, what I do is help my clients build their businesses and fulfill their dreams. But it's not just a formula to make more money or get more clients.
What I'm looking, also, what I'm paying close attention is that my clients are being true to themselves. That they're being true to their values, that they're being true to the mission they have, that they're being true to the way they wanna spend their lives.
And I think living a life that is true to ourselves comes down to two things. Number one, our desires, and number two, our choice. The incredible power we have to choose.
When my daughter Maya was. Maybe 1-year-old. Someone gave us a book that's called, what Would Darla Do? And the book is the story of this little girl who's going through her day and she gets to choose different things. For example, she wanted to sit in a chair during breakfast, and her sister sat on the chair. So she has a choice. Does she push her sister off the chair or she just goes and gets another chair? And depending on what your kid chooses, Darla will go on one journey or the other. And the book has multiple stops where Darla gets to choose or better, that our kids get to choose for Darla, and they talk about the power to choose throughout the entire book. And I think this is a power we rarely talk about.
We rarely talk about these incredible power we have to choose our thoughts to choose how we wanna feel, to choose what we wanna do.
And I think that many of us, because we don't really focus and develop that power, we go through life feeling like life was chosen for us.
A choice is not a thing. A choice is something we do. We choose and we can choose, and then choose again. We're not confined to stick to the choices we made some years ago. Here's where I think the goals for next year. Having a vision for your next three years is so powerful. Because when we cast a vision and we think of the life we want, the type of business we want, we get to review our choices. We get to look if we are happy or not with what we've chosen. So again, what I see happening in the world is that many people are setting goals and creating visions for the things they currently don't have.
But I think it's very important to choose at least once a year to have everything you have right now. So at least once a year, I spend some time thinking about if I. Want to choose my current life as well. And how I do it, and you can do it yourself, is by asking myself the following question. So once a year I spend some time thinking about how it is to be married to Andrew, the good things that, maybe the things I don't like that much, the areas I wanna improve.
And then the question is the following, if I already knew everything I know about being married to Andrew for eight years, but I wasn't married to him. Would I marry him again? Would I propose to him? And when the answer is yes, then I know that that choice that I made eight years ago to marry him is still a choice that I wanna make today.
Here's another example. You can look at your closet. And you can ask yourself the following, if all these clothes that are here weren't mine, would I buy them? Would I buy this shirt? Would I buy those shoes? And if the answer is no, I want you to become aware that then you're choosing to keep in your closet something that you don't want.
But if you say, yes , I would buy this shirt again. Yes, I would buy this pair of pants again, then you're gonna have your in your closet, all the things that are aligned with your desires, with the things that you want. Your entire closet is gonna be an example of you using the power to choose. This also applies in our businesses.
One of the most common conversations I have with my clients is about their employees. When employees are underperforming or when they're hiring someone or they're having an issue with one of their employees, and especially when someone is underperforming, the question I like to ask my clients is the following.
If you had all the information, if you knew everything about what it is to have this person as your employee. But they weren't your employee. Would you hire them? Would you hire them today? And if the answer is no, that is very important to look at because why are you keeping an employee in your company that you wouldn't hire today?
And basically we can do this for every single area of our life. Would I, if I didn't have this company, would I start it again? Would I get it in this place? If my days weren't spent in this way, would I still spend the days, hour by hour in this way? If I wasn't making this amount of money, would this be the amount of money I choose to make and the way I choose to make it?
So in order to live a life that is true to yourself, you need to be aware of your choices and you need to remember that you can choose still the things that you chose some years ago, or you can decide that the choice you made eight years ago, five years ago, last week, you don't want it anymore.
Another area where I see sometimes entrepreneurs get stuck, is that they, for example, set a project in their company. They're gonna do this marketing campaign or they're going to launch a product or a service on this date. But when they're starting to execute, they start not wanting to do that. And I'm not talking about the times that you wanna do it, but you're scared of doing it. I'm talking about the times where you look at it and you're like, this does not align with my business. This is not aligning with what I wanna do with the business, but they keep doing it because they believe that they can't quit on their goals.
And I think that if you are launching a new product or you're doing certain marketing campaign and you are not feeling it, it's not aligning with you. It's very important to know also when to quit a goal. When to say, I'm not gonna keep going with this.
One of my friends who's a business owner went through this recently. She had decided that the last two months of the year she wasn't gonna do a big sales campaign or a big marketing campaign because she was going to instead take some time to organize some systems and some things that she needed to clean up in her business.
But then someone invited her and I to do a challenge, and a challenge was around revenue at the end of the year, and because she was invited to this, she decided to start selling. But a week later or 10 days later, after starting this challenge, she was feeling off. She was feeling like things weren't working, that it was too much work, that she was overwhelmed and we had a conversation about this and she had to choose again.
Her vision for the end of the year that was not doing a big push for sales. But instead cleaning up her house, her office. So she had to give up the invitation to participate in the revenue challenge. So I want you to notice how many times in your business you're making this decisions because everyone is doing this in this time, or because.
An investor gave me an idea and I need to execute on it right away. You are the CEO. You get to choose everything in your business. You get to decide how you wanna run it, what you wanna do, what you don't wanna do. So you can have a business that is true to yourself and not the business that others are expecting of you.
The other tool I use when I make choices is asking myself why I'm making that choice. And I think I've talked about this in other episodes but I think it's such a great tool to use that i'm gonna say it one more time here. When I'm making a choice for my business, I write down all the reasons why I do wanna do this and all the reasons why I don't wanna do it.
And then I just focus on the reasons and I eliminate all those reasons that are not the reasons I want to use to determine my life or my business or my future. So for example. If, I'm doing a marketing campaign or I'm launching some type of marketing effort, and I am excited because I think it's gonna add value to everyone who participates on it because I wanna meet more people because I think it's a great way of bringing people into our company and letting them know about our services and what we do.
And on the other side, I have things like. Oh, it's gonna be so much work. I'm not gonna have enough time. I'm not sure if it's going to work. When I look at this comparison and I look at a reason like it's too much work.
Too much work is not what I want to decide the future of my business. So instead, I wanna think about how can I do it more intelligently so that way I'm not spending too much time in things that I don't wanna do. So again, when you're making a choice, you can ask yourself, okay, if I'm gonna hire this employee, what are all the reasons why I wanna hire this employee?
And what are all the reasons why I don't wanna hire this employee? And this, just focus on the reasons and really use only the reasons that are aligned with your values, with your vision, with your leadership.
Recently I was working with a client, we went through this exercise together and we wrote all the reasons why she wanted to implement this project and then all the reasons why she didn't wanna do it. And what I thought was so fascinating is after we studied the reasons, there were five reasons as to why she didn't wanna do it. And there were maybe two or three in the side of why she did wanna do it. But there was one reason in the side of why she wanted to do it that was bigger than all the other ones.
And it was because I want to. And when she realized that she was doing this project because she wanted to do it because she had the desire to do it. We now looked at the reasons why not to do it as the excuses the brain was presenting. So it's not even about the number of reasons, it's about the weight of the reasons on each side.
And going back to this idea of having it all right, I think they've sold us that. I don't know about you, but many times when I log into Instagram, I log out fast. One because I'm doing it from my computer and it's not as fun. And two, because I feel like it's full of people telling me how to live my life.
And I know I do this in a podcast, I give you ideas that you can implement, but sometimes I feel like it's very prescriptive and I wanna follow more my own intuition, my own voice. Like do the things that I know internally I wanna do. So the pursuit of wanting to have it all, I don't think it's a good pursuit. I think it will give us burned out.
And also because we need to acknowledge that this life is made of trade-offs. Every time you say yes to something, you saying no to a lot of other things. There's no way of saying yes to everything or no to everything. There's always a trade-off, and what I wanna invite you to consider from this episode is that those trade-offs are not made by others, are not made based on fear are not made because this is how things are, but are made from your power to choose.
I think it is the most amazing power we have as human beings.
Okay, so I've been selling you on, on choosing on, on being in choice about your life. But what happens a lot of the times is people ask me, but how do I know what to choose? And I think that when we are asking ourselves that question, it's because we haven't been very connected to our desires.
Every day more I believe the desires are another superpower. Desires, fuel us with energy, give us clarity as to where we wanna go, what we wanna do, who do we wanna be hanging out with. But the problem is that when we are so busy in our lives, we're going from one thing to the next, to the next. We're always on our phones.
We don't leave a lot of room to connect to our desires and our desire is that little voice that is saying, ah. I want this. Oh, this would be great. Oh, I wish we could do this. And if you stop listening to it because you're so busy or because maybe you're scared, this voice starts squirting down and it never disappears, but it does become softer and softer and you stop you.
You can even forget you have it. But the beautiful thing is that the more you start activating it, the more it starts getting louder and clearer and bigger. And then choice is easy because you know what you want.
By the way, many times people have come to me and said, Caro, I really don't know what I want to do. Or, I really don't know if I want something or what do I want? And every single time I've proven them wrong. They do know what they want. The problem is that their heads are filled with excuses that come from fear or from other people's expectations.
If right now you're listening to this and you're feeling confused or overwhelmed or stuck and you're feeling like you actually can choose. Or that you really don't know what you want. I recommend you start small. You start paying attention to the small desires throughout the day. Oh, I want a cup of coffee.
I wanna go outside. I wanna watch this movie. I wanna give someone a hug. And you start taking mental note of how you do desire throughout the day. I even recommend that you start writing the desires that you are. Observing within yourself, because the more you're paying attention to your desires, the more the desire voice within you is going to grow and start talking to you about the biggest desires in terms of your life or your business.
And the last topic I wanna talk about today is courage. Following our desires requires courage because many times our desires lead us through uncertain paths or lead us to places where maybe our friends or family members don't approve of. And we need the courage to follow our own desires to really create a life and live a life that is true to ourselves. But courage doesn't look like certainty.
Courage doesn't look like confidence. Courage feels a lot like fear, and I think I've talked about this as well, but I think it's so important to remember that we're being courageous when we're experiencing the fear, but we still are choosing our own desire.
Currently, my coach is doing this program where she's filming herself throughout the day and teaching us all how she thinks about life and her work, which has been very cool to see. But one of the things that's been happening is that she has been very sick and she has two small kids and they've been very sick and she's been sick throughout the entire year basically.
And in the behind the scenes, she was talking to us about how she feels vulnerable to share that she gets sick so often because she's worried that maybe her clients or people who wanna hire her as a coach are gonna think that she doesn't have the capacity to coach the capacity to really deliver on results because she's been so sick.
I am, I've been her client for the last two years and I can tell you like she delivers incredibly, but I get that fear, right? So she had some options. She could hide and pretend that she's not sick because when she shows up to the calls, you couldn't tell she's sick. We know it's because she tells us and just pretend that her life is all put together, that her kids never get sick, that they don't have these challenges that all of us that have kids know we have.
But her desire has always been to be a role model of a very real life. To be not the mother who's always posting the pictures of their kids perfectly dressed, perfectly well behaved, but who also talks about when the kids are misbehaving or they're sick, or things are a little bit rocky at home because she wants to be an example of having all these situations we have in our life and still being the leader that she's, and still running the incredible company she runs.
So especially when we are leaders, having the courage to follow our desires, to follow our values . That's how we create a business and a life that is aligned to our truest self. And courage. I also think it's something that we practice and practice and we get better at it.
When you stop doing things because you're scared, your fear becomes stronger. When you do the things you wanna do, even when you're scared, your courage gets stronger.
Remember, and take it into account as you're planning your year for next year, or as you're casting your vision or setting your goals, that the first thing you need to do is connect to your desires. Listen to that voice inside of you that is telling you what is it that you want. Secondly. Remember the power to choose.
Remember that that is the biggest power we have as human beings, and choose your desires. And three, have the courage to execute on them. To actually follow through and overcome the obstacles, maybe the rejection, the disapproval that comes so you can create a life that you want.
I think if we're choosing our lives every day. We won't have to regret not living a life that was true to ourselves. Alright, my friends, have a good one. See you next week.
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
