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 77 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. So here's, I want us to have a conversation today. I want to imagine that you and I are sitting at a coffee shop. And you're asking me about coaching and why I love it and what is it? And you're very curious about this thing I do. When I graduated from college, I moved to New York from Colombia and I started working at Morgan Stanley in private wealth management.
I thought that was my passion. I thought that was my dream, and I was so excited to get that job. I remember feeling awe. And very soon after I started working there, I realized that's not what I wanted to do the rest of my life. But honestly, I had no idea what I was gonna do next.
Some years later, I was having a conversation with my boss and she was asking me about my plans for my future, for my career. I was very honest with her. I said, listen, I enjoy my job right now, but I don't see myself doing this in the long term. And I have no idea what else to do.
And she said, Kato, you would be an incredible coach. I had never heard about coaching. This was around 2008, 2009. Back then, coaching is not what it is today that I think many more people have heard about it or have had an experience with a coach. I didn't understand what she was talking about, but she explained to me that she had hired a coach. She was working with a coach and how that coach was helping her reach her goals, strengthen the way she thought, and how to manage and process her emotions and as she was selling me this, I felt inside of me something that was saying, yes, yes, this resonates.
I love this. And since then I started exploring coaching and it's been a long journey and I've been now a coach since 2011. If you had asked Carolina back then when I was studying economics and finance, that I was gonna become a coach, it would've seemed insane, but truly is in coaching that I found my passion.
It's been the one thing in my life that I've never gotten tired of every time I want a new certification to learn something deeper, to read another book about it. To work with more people. I'm so fascinated by how, as humans we create our lives. How, by the way we think and where we focus and put our attention, we create beautiful, fulfilling. Abundant rich lives or how we create so much pain and chaos around us. It doesn't mean that life doesn't bring circumstances that challenge us, but again, I have found that these tools that I teach and that I live by in coaching allow us to navigate those very difficult moments.
So here's a question many people ask me, but do you actually need a coach to succeed?
Here's what I believe. There are many successful people that haven't had a coach. We don't need a coach. What we need to think is. What kind of person chooses to have a coach and why? Why do we choose to have a coach? So let me go to the very basics in case this is the first time you've been hearing about coaching, or you have, and and you're curious to know a little bit more.
What is the difference between therapy, mentorship, and coaching? So therapy. I'm gonna acknowledge there's a lot of different types of therapy, but in general, therapy was created and developed for those moments in our life when we're struggling, when we're facing depression, when we're facing grief, when we have high levels of anxiety or something is just not working in our life, and therapists are incredible to help us heal our wounds from the past to heal whatever is happening to us in this moment so we can start operating as our normal self.
Therapy tends to look at the past, so it's very common that if you start going through therapy, you're gonna be talking about your childhood, your family of origin. Maybe some of the stories that you created when you were little that are affecting you today, or maybe some of the situations you had to confront, and especially with your parents or your siblings, and how they're impacting you today.
And I love therapy and I've done therapy myself. And I've seen so much value in what it serves. It has helped me at times tremendously. And one of the things that I think it's different from therapy and coaching is that therapy looks more at the past, while coaching is looking more towards your future.
And also in therapy, there's diagnosis usually, even in the United States, especially like therapists, when they're billing insurance, they have to name what is going on with us. In coaching, there's not a diagnosis. In fact, in my first certification when I became a coach.
One of the core principles we learned is a belief that all humans are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. So even when at times. I've coached the client who at the same time is going through depression or facing a mental health challenge, from my coaching perspective, I'm not focused on that.
I am focused on the belief that they are whole and they're resourceful right now, and that they have incredible potential and dreams and abilities to continue moving forward towards the future They want. So again, therapy is looking to more towards the past and sometimes making a diagnosis while coaching is looking towards the future and we don't diagnose.
Then there's mentorship. Mentorship is when you work with someone who has already done what you wanna do. So right now I have a business mentor. She has built a very successful coaching business and she has been teaching me how to do it. So mentors are people who have walked the path that we want to walk, and a lot of the times I think people confuse mentorship with coaching because I will hear something like, oh, I want a coach who has worked in finance, or I want a coach who has been a doctor or who knows about this industry. And yes, of course there are coaches that use their past experiences in the way they coach their clients. Mentorship and coaching are very different because mentorship is very based on advice.
I have walked your path, so let me tell you how I did it so you can do the same thing. While in coaching, we're not giving you advice so much. What we're doing is we're helping you find the answers within yourself. We're. Looking at your blind spots, we're showing you, the way you're thinking, and how that thinking is impacting your life and offering new ways to think.
Now also I think it's important to say that there's so many different types of coaching. In fact, I've been coached and certified through many different methodologies. There's the more ontological type of coaching that is focused on being present with you on doing a deep. Search of how you're thinking right now, what you're feeling.
It's helping you go within and find the answers to the questions you have right now. And there's executive coaching that is more focused on your leadership, on things that have to do with work. There's life coaching that has to do with your relationships. There's people who are coaching others in helping them lose weight.
Here's what I believe all of us as coaches have in common. We are helping you become the version of yourself you wanna be. So that might be if you are a vice president and you wanna get to the C-suite level, or you wanna lose weight, or you wanna find a partner and you wanna be in a relationship, or you wanna start a business, or you wanna double the revenue in your business.
Here's what I know, in coaching, no matter, our methodology is helping you become the version of yourself you wanna become. So as I've gone through all these trainings and certifications and thousands of hours coaching people, I feel like I've developed my own approach.
And this approach is because it's my favorite. It's because I see the best results with my clients, and it is first based on a vision, on a goal, on a dream.
Although I can help you to understand your present and what's happening right now. Most of my clients hired me and I love doing this work, is because they have this goal, this vision, this thing they wanna create in their lives, and they want support getting there. And the other thing is that my coaching is not just about action.
It's not just about the tactics about what you have to do or the action steps. It is about your identity. I strongly believe that the way you see yourself creates the life you have right now. And I see it so often. I meet people who have bigger businesses than me and the way. They think about their businesses is different than me and I'm wanting to learn how to think and be like them so I can grow a business.
When you're working with me, we're not simply setting goals and achieving them, but I'm helping them become the person who naturally is living the results of those goals. So let me give you a couple of examples. I had a client when she first hired me, she was working at a corporate job and she wanted to start her business. And the most important thing was I wanted to start a business, but I need to make the same amount of money I'm making in my current job in this business. And she was very nervous, of course, because she has a responsibility to her family.
It was a big risk to leave a very successful corporate job. But through the coaching, she became the business founder who had. A seven figure business and who could pay herself the same amount that corporation paid her. And that was true for the first year and the second year and the third year, and so on and so forth.
So she became the woman who pays herself from her business even more, of course, because as her business is growing and is having more profit, she gets to share in that profit.
Or another example is one of my clients who came to me because she has a very successful business. She had been growing it for 10 or 15 years, but she was feeling this calling to expand that business, to offer different services to take it not just nationally, but globally. She told me she didn't see how she can bring up energy to do that because she already was working so many hours and feeling so tired.
What we did together was evolve the way she saw herself, so she was not just a business owner of this. Company she had right now, but she was the business owner of this organization that had multiple different businesses in it. And then when we started doing that work, she had to change the relationship to how she managed time.
She learned, had to learn to delegate, to hire the right people, to take bigger risks, to take even better care of herself. So for example, one of the things we achieved is that she started working out and she twice a week after the workout, she even has time to go into the sauna and rest.
And this was something she didn't believe she had time for before. And now that's what she does. Now, she understands that taking care of herself is fundamental to continue growing her business.
And the business is growing. It's expanding in the most incredible ways. So again, what is it that I do? When you come to me, the first thing we are gonna decide is what is that vision? What is that goal? What are we working towards? And then we're gonna be looking at you as a human being. What are the.
Blind spots that you have that you maybe haven't seen, you can address them. We're gonna look at your fears and self-doubt, anything that is holding you back from living and fulfilling that vision. We're gonna look at how you manage your energy, how you manage your time, how you navigate your emotions, and we're gonna start developing that identity of the person who lives that dream that you have.
So again, I don't believe that everyone needs a coach. Coaching is not for people who are broken. Coaching is for people who are serious and committed to their dreams and their vision. And one of the things that I have found very interesting is that sometimes high performers resist coaching.
They tell themselves, well, you know, I should be able to figure this out by myself, or I'm always the one who has the answer, so why wouldn't need a coach? Or sometimes they're so blind to their own blind spots that they're oblivious that there are certain problems that are truly affecting their day-to-day, the results they create.
One of my clients was facing a challenge, and it was that her business was growing so fast that her employees were feeling really exhausted. Burning out. She was burning out. She was also so tired and exhausted, when we started coaching, she believed that she had to continue selling, that she had to continue bringing in clients, and that as she was going, she was gonna figure it out. And every client that came in, she would say, yes, let's go.
We'll figure it out. We'll use this part of the team here, that part of the team there. but through coaching, what she realizes that getting more and more and more clients. Didn't actually solve or created the goal she wanted, which was a sustainable business with clients who were bigger, profit margins bigger.
So she was so focused on this belief that she had to get more, that she hadn't stopped to reassess really what are the type of clients that I want. So then she realized that she was getting more clients because she was very focused on her revenue, on growing her revenue, not so much on her profit. The moment she started paying closer attention to her profit, she became more picky about the type of clients she was allowing to come into her business.
And that alone had so many positive impacts, right? One, her being more profitable, so she had more of the profit share to bring back to her family. Two, her team was working the same or maybe even a little bit less, and they were making more money.
Three, she was choosing better quality clients names that made her brand more trustworthy, more recognized in her industry. So it's little things like this, and I have 1 million stories of these little blind spots that when we're business owners, we're moving forward so fast that we don't even realize the stories we're telling ourselves are impacting the reality that we are creating.
So regardless if you have a coach or you don't have a coach. The way you're thinking is impacting the results. Another thing I've seen from high performance is when they tell me, okay, Caro, we coached for six months. Now I wanna try it on my own. And it's almost like if there was a belief that if they hire a coach, that meant they couldn't do it on their own.
And the way I like to think about it is professional athletes, let's say Federer in tennis, when he decided he wanted to become a professional, he assembled his own team. A coach, a trainer, a doctor, I'm sure many other people were helping him achieve the dream of, let's say, winning Wimbledon.
And he did it. But when he won Wimbledon, he didn't say, okay, now I wanna try winning Wimbledon without my team. No, that's not how the most successful people think. It's not about doing it alone. That's not what matters. It's about how do I position myself in the best way to achieve my goals?
Many of the people that I surround myself with who are incredibly successful, and not just because of the money they make or the successful businesses they've built, but because they also have beautiful relationships with their families.
They take care of their health. They have very well-rounded lives. Most of them have people helping them become that version of themselves. It is common that I can hear, yeah, we hired a parenting coach or we hired a sleeping coach for the kids, or we hired a health coach, because we absolutely can do it alone, but we can go further when we do it with someone else.
For years I exercised by myself. I either went for runs or I had an app that would tell me what exercises to do. And some years ago, about three or four years ago I hired my own personal trainer and the results have been completely.
Different. And here's why. Because when I exercised by myself and my brain started to tell me that it was too much, that it was too heavy, that I was too tired, I would naturally slow down. Right now when I feel that my trainer tells me, give me two more reps. You can do it.
Absolutely. Or he challenges me by giving me weights that are heavier than the ones last week. And every workout with him feels way harder. But I also can see the results physically, emotionally, in my health because our brains are designed to help us survive. And survive means stay in your comfort zone. Don't seek risk. Don't seek potential pain. Save energy. Don't be uncomfortable. Don't put yourself out there. Don't make yourself visible. Don't make cold calls. Avoid those difficult, uncomfortable conversations.
But in order to succeed, we have to go against our survival instincts. And when we have someone who is outside of us who is not feeling the risk in the same way that we are, but who understands the goals we want to achieve, that person is gonna help us overcome those natural barriers and obstacles we all create in our minds.
A coach is not someone you hire because you're broken. A coach is someone you hire because you understand your own humanity. You know that our brains have an inner conflict between the part of us that wants to have a fulfilling life and the part of us that has to survive, and those parts sometimes want opposite things for us.
So we hire a coach because we wanna live the biggest life we can live. Now, when I'm talking with people and they're considering hiring me as our coach, I have noticed a couple of things that get in the way, and I wanna share them with you so you can explore how that feels for you.
The first one is something around a fear. That is disguised like logic, so they might say something like, it's not the right time, or Maybe when I achieve this, then I'll call you something along those lines. But when I go a little bit deeper, often it's because they don't fully believe that their dream is possible for them.
They don't fully believe that they are capable of building that vision of getting to those goals. And what I wanna say about that is that actually that's where coaching can help you. When someone starts working with me with desire but not belief, we learn how to use desire as fuel, as motivation to do the things we need to do to build our business while the belief is catching up and we also do deep belief work. So you can start aligning your desires to your belief, meaning that business that you dream about, having, that lifestyle you dream about having while you run your business is possible for you. Another reason why sometimes people don't hire a coach is because they don't believe coaching works, and I get it.
Coaching is intangible. It's not like buying a pair of shoes or something in the grocery store. You are buying something that you can't hold with your hands. The exercise I like. My clients to do before we start working together is to think about the return on their investment. So if they're gonna be spending thousands of dollars in coaching, I want them to think, what do they need to get back from the six months a year that we're working together in order to feel like they got a return on their investment and we get very clear on what that is. And then the second part of the mindset we have to shift is that hiring a coach is not like hiring a course or a program where you're attending in a very passive way waiting to see what information the teacher or the professor is giving to you, and then you're taking notes and kind of agreeing and learning and maybe doing some homework. I like to think about coaching as a well, where you are living your life, where you are building your dream, your business, and you go to this well to get clarification, to overcome obstacles, to learn about your blind spots, and evolve your current limitations. You come to coaching, not because coaching is telling you what to do, but because it's a place where you overcome and grow and have clarity of the things you're wanting to achieve.
It's a place where you go to talk about your own experience, what you are facing as you're building your business, and have a coach help you get clear, showing your blind spots, coming up with ways of thinking around your obstacles.
And the third reason why sometimes. Business founders don't invest in coaching is because they're thinking that their money should only be invested in very tactical things, paying for ads, hiring people, building systems. But they hesitate a little bit on, on doing the inner work because again, it's intangible.
It looks like there is no direct ROI and yet. What I know is that you can have all the tactics in place. You can Google anything. You can YouTube anything. But if your mindset is not in the right place, you are not gonna execute those tactics correctly. At the end of the day, the one thing that will hold the business back is your brain.
Some weeks ago I saw a post by Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx, that said, the following " your business will expose every unhealed part of you. Your abandonment issues show up when clients leave. Your scarcity mindset shows up in your pricing, your control issues show up in your inability to delegate. Entrepreneurship isn't just a career path. It's involuntary therapy that forces you to confront who you really are."
And that's what I mean. Any unhealed parts and limiting beliefs. Any stories that you've heard from the world about money and pricing and delegating and the way you need to show up if you don't review them and you are mindful and you have intentionality on how you wanna show up, what do you wanna believe those are the things that are gonna hold your business back?
And listen, if Sarah Blakely is posting this after making billions of dollars, I think we can all learn a little bit from that and take it too heart and know that as entrepreneurs, we've signed up not only to grow a business, but to grow ourselves. And that's where coaching is a wonderful tool.
Here's the other thing I've noticed. Most people evaluate how much money they're gonna be investing in coaching, but rarely they evaluate the cost of staying where they are. Taking a long time to make decisions because they're unsure, not having difficult conversations with their business partners and then starting to create so much distance between them that work becomes a problem, a toxic environment. Avoiding to have difficult conversations with their employees and holding onto employees that are not only underperforming, not doing their work, but are bringing the entire team down.
Ending up burnt out with no energy, thinking they have to work so many hours That they work so much that takes a toll on their health. Avoid cold calling or reaching out to someone that feels uncomfortable and you're scared of doing it. And then missing out on opportunities and in general, living in so much reactivity that you are putting a fires every day running all the time without getting ahead and being able to be more strategic about the business and also the lifestyle you wanna have. So if you are thinking, considering hiring a coach or not considering hiring a coach, the next question then it should be, how do we choose the right coach for us? And one of the beautiful things about coaching is that it's not regulated. So as coaches, we really get to bring in all of our experiences, our trainings.
We are not required by government to give a diagnosis or put our clients in a specific box. That's beautiful. But that also means that the barrier to entry to this industry is very, very low. So anyone can call themselves a coach. So what are some things you wanna look for first?
I think hearing recommendations. People around you who have worked with coaches, word of mouth. I think that is huge. Understanding what is the goal? What is it that you are wanting to achieve, and maybe finding someone that specializes in that, asking for if they have any certifications. How long have they been coaching?
I think both are important. Certification. As coaches, they give us tools, they give us frameworks. There's other people supervising us and giving us advice of how we're doing our own work, but also the numbers of hours that we've been coaching give us an experience that no classroom can ever teach us.
Start there first. See if you feel the connection. If you feel the trust.
At the end of the day, I think what you want in a coach is someone that makes you feel safe, so you can be vulnerable and open and at the same time stretched because they're holding the bigger vision of your desires and they're willing to risk the relationship with you, meaning they will not hold back in calling out any of the limiting beliefs, having the difficult, uncomfortable conversations always for the sake of you reaching your goals and you becoming that version of you that you want to become.
I've identified three types of entrepreneurs who get the most value out of working with me. The first one is a founder who has built their business, they have something solid, their revenue is consistent, but they feel like they've reached a plateau and they have the desire to expand beyond that.
The second one is the business founder who's experiencing rapid growth. Clients are coming, there's a lot of demand for their work, but they're feeling exhausted. They're working weekends, nights, and they're need to grow capacity to be able to sustain the growth of their business.
And the third type are corporate leaders who are considering leaving their corporate job to start their own business or have already transitioned there. That was me some years ago and I remember that. Although we're capable, we're strategic, our networks are great. Being an entrepreneur requires different skills than being a corporate leader, and we feel the emotional exposure bigger. It's putting ourselves out there and becoming visible without the infrastructure or the reputation of a big brand behind us.
That is a transition in which coaching is incredibly helpful, especially for those of you who are considering becoming a fractional CMO or CFO or CHRO and doing contracting work coaching is really useful in changing that mindset and building your new identity as an entrepreneur.
Personally, I, well, it's obvious I love coaching and I love coaching other people, but I also love being coached because I am committed to living a life that I'm in constant breakthrough in learning every day and developing new skills and expanding myself. A life where I'm constantly learning about myself, finding new tools, expanding my vision, having a bigger impact, having better relationships with the people I love, and who with whom I work.
So the biggest message I want you to take is that coaching is a decision. If you are building something big, I think a really great question to ask yourself is, who is on my team?
Who are the people I'm gonna surround myself with that are gonna help me become the best version of myself? That can include a coach, and maybe that also includes a therapist and a mentor and peers who you admire. But I love that saying that says you can go faster when you're on your own. You can go further when you're with others if as you're listening to this, the little voice of wisdom that whisper we all have inside is telling you, yes, I want this. Yes, I wanna live a life of breakthrough. Yes. I want a team to help me become the best version of myself. And you connected to me.
I invite you to go to the link in the description, fill out your name and email and we'll be in touch.
Thank you for staying with me through this entire episode and allowing me to share about something I feel so much passion for, and I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for tuning in. 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!
