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, welcome back. This is episode 69 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. How are all of you? How's your week going so far? We just wrapped up a really interesting weekend. We were with our oldest daughter she was auditioning for her dance competition, and then we had rented a studio because we needed some pictures for our new website that we're working on. It's still gonna take us a while to be able to share it with all of you, but we're working on it right now.
And you know, pictures that we usually use for social media and other things, and. Listen, I became a coach. I never thought I was gonna have to be part of a photo shoot. My aspiration was never to be, you know, in photos or I. You know, influencing or whatever that looks like and I've learned to do it because I know that I have a very strong mission of helping people live up to their values, build businesses that are aligned with their desires.
They give them not only the business they like, but also the lifestyle they want. So throughout the years, I've done a couple of photo shoots. The first one was the most awkward thing I've ever done. I think with the years I'm not good at it, but I've gotten a little bit more comfortable. But anyway, to give you a little bit more behind the scenes, the person who takes pictures is Andrew.
Andrew has been an amazing photographer. He usually, he's not taking pictures of people. He takes pictures of nature and space, but since he has the equipment and he's really good at it and he likes it and I preferred that, he's the one taking pictures. We've always done it together.
So this weekend we had rented a studio space for taking pictures, and we went as a family. Our two girls, Andrew and I, and it was quite the adventure. Having two little girls that wanna be in the pictures, but were also so sweet helping, you know, stand here to test the lights, stand there.
They brought colors and all kinds of art supplies to get themselves entertained. We ended up taking a lot of pictures. It's always hard. I feel like it's hard to get good pictures, but I think we are gonna have some that we can use. we're also able to take some of the girls who are just so, so, so cute. Anyway, that's a little bit behind the scenes of the family owned business that we are so passionate for coaching all of you and really bringing our mission to life and fulfilling this purpose of creating businesses that are conscious, that are driven by people who are doing their work and that are adding value to the world in so many different ways.
And that brings me to today. If you've been following this podcast for a while, you've probably already heard me say that I believe that wherever the CEO's mindset, the way they think, the way they process emotions, the management they have of themselves, of their thoughts, their beliefs, their emotion is a hundred percent reflected in their business.
By the speed that business is growing, by the culture they're creating inside the business. If it's a healthy culture or when there are business owners that haven't done work in themselves, and I see it all the time also, when I'm coaching leaders of other companies, how it can become a very complicated culture because the leaders or the founders limiting beliefs, insecurities get translated into the culture and it usually doesn't create a very healthy space.
Bottom line. That wherever you are as a founder, wherever you are as a business leader, you're having a direct impact on everyone who's around you.
And one of the ways that we can talk about this is through your capacity.
last week I shared with you that we launched this assessment. It's a free online quiz. It's about 15 questions that helps you understand the level you're at in different aspects of your capacity.
You can think about capacity as the ability a business owner has to handle different aspects of our own humanity when they're running a business.
when we hit seven figures or more. Even from the beginning, I've seen it. It's not the strategy that will hold back a business or that will stall a business. We can read about strategies anywhere and everywhere, and we can find business cases for when those strategies work.
Usually a business gets stuck because the founder's internal capacity hasn't caught up with the new level of growth. Strategies usually are loud problems. Facebook ads are not working. We need a new strategy the way we're delivering this to our clients is not working. We need a new process.
Strategy problems tend to be very loud and everyone can see them. Capacity problems are harder to identify, are harder to put your finger on. You might see that there's something happening, like the business is not growing or the business is being held back, or people are quitting or people are unhappy or not as engaged at work, but you can't quite figure out what it is. So what I wanna do in this episode is walk you through the five capacities, these assessment, measures so you can understand better what they're about.
And then I'm really wanna encourage you to go take it. And if you wanna share your results with us or your thoughts, we would love to hear. But here's the mindset. It's not about. Pointing fingers or feeling bad or feeling shame. It's about creating your own self-awareness of the places within yourself where you can continue to evolve and grow so you can hold a bigger leadership position, a bigger business, have more impact, make more money, et cetera.
Also, what I think is interesting about this way of looking at capacities is because I don't think it's, a thing you're gonna find in a textbook about business, it's something that i've learned from being a coach and from working with so many of you and also working on myself.
So the first capacity the assessment measures is called the personal responsibility capacity. This is your ability to take radical ownership for your results. To make decisions quickly and to see yourself as the creator of the circumstances and the results of your business, rather than the victim of them.
For me, personal responsibility is a lifelong journey. It's our ability to really tap into our power to understand that we are creators and to understand the impact we have in everything that surround us, even when it can feel sometimes that it's because of external circumstances.
so In this assessment, we're gonna be asking you questions like, what is the first thing you think when something goes wrong? Does your brain automatically go to, it's the market. Oh, we're not doing enough. It's our people. Do you go into self shame and start blaming yourself because you're not a great leader or because you've made a bad decision?
Where does your attention go when things are not working?
It will also ask you about how often do you believe in trivial thoughts such as, I don't have time. My team can't handle this. It's too hard. Here, what we're trying to do by assessing your personal responsibility capacity is to understand how often do you see yourself. As the creator and person responsible for what's happening in your business and how often do you feel the things that are out of your control, and they're happening because of others, because of politics, the markets and all that. And that's not to say that external circumstances don't impact your business, but it's to understand your mindset.
How do you think through these challenges?
And on the flip side, we also wanna measure how often do you blame yourself or shame yourself? Because personal responsibility sometimes gets confused with being super hard on yourself, taking ownership of things that are not yours to be, to take.
Having fully integrated personal responsibility as a capacity means that you can look at a problem that's happening, understand what's creating it. Take responsibility for your impact and your influence in that problem. Take a hundred percent responsibility for solving it, understanding what your brain is telling you.
And then making decisions to figure it out to solve the problem.
The second capacity this assessment measures is your emotional capacity. Emotional capacity measures your ability to stay regulated and clear when things feel uncomfortable, uncertain, risky, or tense, it's your ability to lead from your values and your vision, and not from pressure, fear, or stress.
All of us are having feelings all the time. And when we're building a business, there are a lot of feelings that show up. Anything from the worry of will we always have the revenue to pay all of our employees and our contractors, or when a client gets upset about something.
Or when an employee gets upset about something, or when someone in the business makes a mistake that's gonna have an impact on revenue or on the reputation of the business or yourself
I think being an entrepreneur is signing up for an incredible emotional rollercoaster.
So to develop your emotional capacity is to develop your emotional intelligence, is to develop your ability to notice what you're feeling, naming what you're feeling, processing those emotions so they don't stop you or derail you from what you need to get done. Learning to regulate your nervous system so you can remain calm, so you can continue to have access to your higher level thinking.
When we don't know how to manage our emotions or when we're scared of having certain emotions, we tend to procrastinate. We tend to avoid those things that make us feel uncomfortable, but that are so important for our business, like having difficult conversations, setting boundaries, giving feedback. Making decisions that are uncertain that you don't know if they're gonna work or not work.
As you develop your emotional capacity, what you are doing is you are expanding your ability to be with uncertainty, your ability to be with discomfort, and when you are a business founder and you can be with more uncertainty, that means you can make bigger bets within your business. And as we know, growing a business means taking risk.
The definition of entrepreneurship is to take on risk with the hope of high rewards, but if you don't have the emotional capacity to hold that risk, you're going to hold yourself back, and also you're gonna hold your business back.
And most of us, when we think about business, we think about the financial risk. But we have to remember that there's also an emotional risk, the risk of failing in front of other people, of being ridiculed, of being embarrassed, of being rejected, of being criticized.
So therefore, as entrepreneurs, we need to learn. How to expand our capacity to be with all those uncomfortable emotions so we can have a bigger business. And by the way, for those of you listening to this episode, who are not business owners, but you are leaders, this applies the same way to you.
The third capacity we measure in the assessment is focus and essentialism. That's your ability to direct time, attention, and energy towards the work that truly moves the business forward. When you've started your own business, as you're growing it, you know there's a million things you could do every day.
Everything is fighting for your attention, especially as you grow a team, especially if you have more customers. Everyone is wanting part of your attention, part of your time, part of your energy.
Focus is your ability to put your attention into something and keep it there. Essentialism is your ability to decide at any given point what is essential for your business. We can have 100 things to do, but not a hundred things are essential to move the business forward.
So when we have a low capacity in focus and essentialism, we spend a lot of time working on things that can be delegated, other people are driving where our focus goes, oh, is people are booking time with me. I'm just being called to all these meetings Versus you deciding what meetings you wanna hold, which ones do you wanna go to or not pushing back when people are asking for your attention. Also, a symbol of low capacity here is you are not very clear on your priorities. Everything seems important, and everything seems urgent, and you are just going through your day, checking things off the list or putting out fires.
You might be the person that you have a great idea and you go for it, and you start it and you're so excited, and then boom, you have another idea, and then you leave that one on the side, and then you go for the next one.
But to grow a business, you cannot be that disorganized. You cannot be running your business based on what feels exciting and inspirational right now.
Of course, being inspired by your business is important, but staying focused is also key to be able to build something long term.
As you grow your business, there's gonna be more things fighting for your time and attention, and if you are not building focus and essentialism as part of your daily lives as a leader of the business, it also is gonna become a problem with everyone who works with you.
If you are a master at choosing what's important, naming the priorities, following through with those priorities, staying focused on things until things get completed, and you start teaching this to your team of people that are working with you, the business is gonna be running way more efficiently.
Moving on to the fourth capacity is called execution capacity. This is your ability to follow through and complete work, especially when it's uncomfortable, imperfect, or no longer exciting. So when we have a low capacity to execute, it means that we may start projects that we never finish. It may mean that we get very distracted by other things, so we are actually not doing the work. It's also when you break commitments you make to yourself. Because you wanna honor commitments you've made to others is when you keep falling off track. It's when it takes you a long time to start something as well. When you have to think so much about it, when you need to make it perfectly.
When you have a high level of execution capacity, you live with integrity within yourself. It means that the word to yourself carries the same weight as the word to others.
You live with high integrity. If you say you are going to do something, you will get it done by that deadline you committed to. When you feel uncomfortable or uncertain about doing something, you know how to decide follow through instead of procrastinating.
It also means, you know how when you start a project and you start very excited, but there's a part of the project that becomes tedious, it becomes hard, other things sound more attractive. You have already learned to calculate for that time. You know that anything you take on is going to hit that messy middle, and you're going to not wanna do it, but do it anyway regardless, because your capacity to execute on time and get things done well something you've trained yourself to do. You have become excellent at moving things forward.
And also you have learned the importance of creating that space to pause and assess the quality of your work. So Execution capacity is not your ability to do a lot of things, but it's your ability to do what you committed to do well and on time.
And the last capacity we measure in the assessment is your ability to delegate, your ability to transfer ownership, not just tasks. So the work can move forward without you.
What I see over and over again is that business owners become the bottleneck of the business. They might have teams we may have told people what to do. We haven't really developed the capacity to explain to someone exactly what we want by when we want it, and transfer the accountability or the ownership to that other person.
So when your capacity to delegate is low, what you're going to see is that you're involved in too many decisions, in too many projects, that people are always waiting for a response from you to be able to move forward.
Or if we looked inside your mind, we may see that yes, you delegated tasks to others, but you're still carrying the mental load. You are worrying about things that others are doing. Are they doing them right? Are they gonna complete them by the deadline? I said that might end up showing up as micromanaging or really getting into the nitty gritty of things where that's not the best place for you to put your attention.
When you have a low capacity to delegate, you may find yourself telling yourself often things like, I'm just gonna get this done. I can do it faster. I know how to do it. Let me just check it off the list. Training someone is gonna take too much time. We don't have time for that. And yes, every now and then you might do something because it's easier for you to do it or faster for you to do it in the moment. But when that becomes your habitual pattern, it points to a struggle you're having of letting go of control, of training people to take over.
Also, sometimes when my clients have a low capacity to delegate and we look deeper is because they don't have the right team. Or they might be telling themselves that they're protecting the team by not giving them that much work.
I was recently having a conversation with a founder, and it was so beautiful because we were coaching around this topic, and she really loves her team. She really wants her team to thrive in her business, and we started noticing the pattern that she would be the one working until midnight 1:00 AM so her team wouldn't burn out, which it's a great thing, right?
Like she's taking care of her team. But she wasn't addressing the real problem because taking care of her team by her working late is not the best way to take care of her team. What she needed to do is hire more people, train more employees to do different things, and also be very honest with her team that at times they might have to work.
Until later that it's not that the type of business she runs is not always a nine to five. Then by switching that mindset of the way to protect my team is not me working until later. But the way to protect my team is by training them up so they can be faster, more efficient in what they do, and by hiring additional employees so there are more people to share the load. That is a a better way to take care of her team than what she had been doing.
So again, sometimes we don't delegate, not because we are control freaks, although sometimes we don't delegate because we are control freaks. But sometimes the stories we tell ourselves can sound very good, like I'm taking care of my team.
And on the other side, when we have a high capacity to delegate, we know how to delegate outcomes, not just tasks. We know that when we hand off a project to someone on our team, we really take that off our mental load.
We have a team that is highly competent. They know how to make decisions for themselves, be resourceful, and they're very clear on what is the outcome we're expecting. We might not be delegating the way something gets done because we allow our team to find the ways that work best for them, but we are very clear on how the final product looks.
One of the things I've noticed coaching not only business owners, but also business leaders in different companies, is that at the beginning of our careers, when we start our business, when we start a a new job, our identity is rooted in what we are doing.
We get self-esteem, we get a sense of accomplishment. By the things we get done in a day and we can become really good executors. The problem is. That there is a point in our careers that the way we add the most value is not by doing, but actually by thinking, inspiring, leading, managing, and that's when the capacity to delegate becomes crucial in order for our businesses to grow.
So there you go. Those are the five capacities you can assess in our new quiz. It really will take you five minutes, no more than that, and it will give you a first glance of how you're doing in different capacities and what are your opportunities for growth so you can continue to grow your business to the biggest vision, and if you're working for a corporation to continue expanding your leadership and impact.
All right. It's so great to be with all of you today. I hope you have a great rest of your week. buh 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!
