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.
Hello, welcome back. This is episode 78 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Today I wanna start with a story. I got certified as a coach in 2011, and then I worked for five years as the director of coaching and training services for a company. But on January, 2016, I started my business that I have today being on my own as a coach. At that same time, there was another woman that I didn't know back then who also started her business. I met her, five or six years later after I had started my business.
And when I met her, her revenue was $10 million a year, and mine was not even close. So of course, the first thing I thought to myself is, I am behind. I started comparing myself to her, trying to understand how could she be so much further along than me. But when I started looking at it, I started feeling even worse in a way. Her previous work experience she was doing retail sales in stores.
While I had been at Morgan and Stanley, I had an MBA, I had already worked for another company that sold coaching services, and I had learned very closely how they did it.
So when I compared our resumes, I thought to myself, well, I should be further ahead. I have better education. I have this experience in other businesses. And that made me feel worse. And I want you to take a moment right now and ask yourself when those moments happen that you think you should be further ahead, or you meet someone from your past or who's your competitor, and you feel bad about yourself because they're doing better, because they have more sales, because their business is bigger because they have a bigger community or a bigger audience.
What is the story you tell yourself? So in my very human way, I went into that story and I started feeling like I could never make it, that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I wasn't cut out to build this business the way I wanted to build it. But then I took a step back and I asked myself the same question.
Why, why is she further ahead than me, but not from a place of shaming, not from a place of comparing who's better or who has a better resume, but in a way of trying to get curious about the facts. And here are some of the facts I found.
One, during the five or six years we both had been in business, she had been laser focused on her business, giving a hundred percent of her attention and energy while I had started and stopped because I had prioritized my family. When Maya was born, I took a step back. I slowed down my sales and marketing processes and I stayed with her. When COVID started andrew was working so much in the job he had I also took a step back because we didn't have anyone else to take care of Maya so I could be with her I hadn't been as focused as her, so that was a point. The other thing is she had previous sales experience. I didn't, although I had more, let's say, fancy, I don't know, titles or whatever.
She had been out there talking to people, selling them products. And for me, that was the hardest part. I had a lot of limiting beliefs around sales. I didn't wanna bother people, I didn't wanna be pushy, I didn't wanna be salesy. So I held back a lot while she was out there selling without asking permission, without being apologetic about it.
Big difference.
From the beginning her prices were significantly higher than mine, and when I look at why wasn't I charging more, it wasn't necessarily because there was a gap in her ability to coach and my ability to coach. It was a gap in the confidence of going out and selling at those prices.
And the last observation I had is she had chosen a segment of clients, a niche from the beginning and had stuck to it while I had started and stopped in very different niches. So I tried it in Spanish than in English, and only with women. I had done many different things. And me starting and stopping didn't allow me to go deeper to build a bigger audience in the segment I had chosen. And finally, and I wanna mention this because. I believe that we shouldn't focus on luck or things that are outside of our control because they're outside of our control.
But I also wanna acknowledge that there are things that can occur that we call them luck, that can help us move faster or further ahead. And in her case, there is a very famous person in our coaching industry who was her mentor, who taught her incredible things and who also shared her platform.
This woman got exposure to a lot of people with the endorsement of someone who already had built an incredible reputation. So of course that also helped her move faster, be seen by more people.
Now I really believe she's an amazing coach and she can deliver and help people achieve their results they want, and that's why she really has built this incredible business. But that push she received from this big mentor was super, super useful.
After I went from feeling bad about myself and not trusting myself, not believing that I could do it, then doing a more curious assessment about our differences and in there identifying things that I had to learn. I needed to learn how to sell, and what I did is hired her as a mentor.
And this is very important because sometimes when we compare ourselves to others, it's easy to go into a scarcity mind. It's easy to think that because they are doing better than us, then there's not enough for us and that we're competing. But when you think about it from an. Abundant perspective, you know that there's enough clients for her and for me, and for any other coach in our industry, and also is true for the industry you are in.
So to finish this story, I did hire her. She's still my coach and since I've been working with her, I have increased my revenue in very significant ways. So I wanted to share that story because one, I know that many of us go into those moments where we feel that we're behind, that we're not where we should be when we compare to others and we feel awful about ourselves. And I just wanna offer a different way of thinking about this. So let me give you some questions you can ask yourself if you're in one of those moments. The first question is when you're telling yourself you are behind, are you comparing yourself to? Is it other people or are you comparing yourself to the expectations you had about where you should be?
So let's start with that. Let's say that you are comparing yourself to some expectations you had. You decided that you were starting your business and that you were gonna be at a certain revenue in year one and at a certain revenue in year two, and you're not there. So the first thing I want you to notice is that those expectations are arbitrary.
You created them without having a business or maybe without having a business at that level. And there are a lot of things that you didn't know. It is good to have expectations, but it also is good to remember that they are arbitrary timelines or numbers we create for ourselves.
The second thing is. How do you feel when you tell yourself that you're behind, and if the feeling is one of feeling small, contracted, or you start feeling urgency and despair and you're working more hours to catch up, I just want to say that that thought is limiting you. I have seen over and over that as entrepreneurs, we have a little bit of a sense of entitlement.
We say, well, if I have put 78 episodes of the podcast, I should have this number of listeners. Or if I have put this number of hours or money into my business, I should be at this stage. But the truth is that when we signed up to be entrepreneurs. There are no guarantees. Nobody promised that if we did certain work, we were gonna get certain result.
I think it's a good idea that we take a step back and check in with ourselves and notice if there's any sense of entitlement if we do see it within ourselves and try to ask ourselves why?
Why was I thinking that this amount of work was gonna deliver this result? Oh, it was a hypothesis because that's how we operate. As entrepreneurs, we create hypothesis. I think that in order to get to this amount of revenue, I need to do those things, but it doesn't mean that our hypothesis. Truths, they're hypothesis.
They're the best guess we can make with the information we have. But the only way we will know if that guess was accurate or not, is by doing that work and seeing the result. But we have to remember that there's no perfect formula. It's just a hypothesis, and we need to test it and try it over again. And then the opportunity comes to evaluate, to bring curiosity. I thought I was gonna be at this level. I thought I was gonna have this number of clients. I thought I was gonna be recognized in a magazine or in a newspaper. I was gonna win this award and I didn't. Let me understand why. Not from a place of beating yourself up, but a place of curiosity.
As entrepreneurs it's very important and it's a great idea to have expectations, to have goals and then make hypothesis of what is the work required to get there. But when we get there, we get to feel disappointed, but I think what will hold us back is feeling entitled to the result.
Now, when we're comparing ourselves to others, I was talking with a friend because our MBA 15 near reunion is coming up and she had had access to see the people that were going to this reunion, and she asked me, have you seen the list? And I told her I hadn't. And then she started telling me about how successful the majority of our classmates are. And it's true, they're all so brilliant and accomplished. And right now they're the leaders of a lot of corporations and they're doing really well.
And her and I have taken a different path. I'm a coach. She is an entrepreneur in a different industry. And of course we don't have these fancy titles. We don't belong to these big corporations. You know, I'm a mom, I'm a coach, I'm running my business. I'm growing it. My resume right now doesn't, if you compare it like in an MBA level or corporate level, doesn't sound as successful if you're gonna call it that way.
Not that I feel that way because I have been very conscious of the choices I've made in my career, and I'm very happy where I am today and with a lot of desire to continue growing. But anyway, the point is. To my friend, this trigger, this feeling of maybe I'm not good enough, maybe I haven't done enough.
Again, this story of I'm behind in some way, but when we talked a little bit longer and we took a look at the decisions we have both made throughout our careers. We remembered that we are exactly where we chose to be. When we were in business school, there was a lot of opportunities for us to work in the big banks, in the big consulting companies, in the big tech companies, but neither of us pursued them because that's not what we wanted.
So now it's unfair that we were saying, oh, we're behind because we never wanted to be there where they're at right now. So I think that when we're comparing to others, it's very important to understand, again, why am I comparing myself to them?
Why am I being triggered? What is the story that's showing up? Where is it that I'm telling myself I should be and why should I be there? Because I've noticed that many times this idea of I'm behind is like this, you know, cloudy idea that it's not really clear or specific. It's more this feeling of I'm behind which is another way of saying I'm not good enough.
But when we look at it clearly, we're like, okay, no, I know why I am here and not where they are, and I'm okay with that. Or maybe I'm not okay with that. And that speaks to a desire that I haven't met, and that's also really good to know. But then we stop the comparison and we focus on that desire on where we wanna be, on who we wanna become.
And I love comparing to others when it serves me as inspiration and fuel to continue pursuing what I really want. So again, with my mentor right now, with my coach right now, she inspired me. She showed me that there is a way of having a multimillion dollar revenue coaching business, which honestly, there's not a lot of them. So having her close to me, showing me how it can be done is super inspiring.
This thought of, I'm behind or I'm not where I should be. We can use that to hurt ourselves, to keep us stuck or to take us to this place of urgency of working extra hours so we can catch up, so we can be where others are.
Or we can use that thought to go deeper and understand better who we are, why we're here, what are the skills we wanna learn? What are our desires telling us? How can we continue to grow and move towards that expectation we have?
So I think comparing ourselves to others is not a problem. It's when we're comparing ourselves to others and hurting ourselves with those thoughts. We can also realize that in this world we could be behind or we can be way further ahead. Because most of us are in the middle of our own journey and we can see this journey as a place of lack of we're behind, not enough. Or we can also turn it and be like, and look at everything I've created and look how courageous I've been look how I have a beautiful work-life balance because I'm not working for a corporation. I get to do this. Look how fulfilled I feel to help my clients achieve their goals. How exciting for me is to be able to sit and record this podcast and share it with all of you.
I want you to take a moment, and if you are comparing yourself to someone who's ahead of you, I want you to also take a moment and compare yourself. To those who are behind, not to feel better than them, but to appreciate all the things that you do have right now.
So as we conclude today's episode, here's the message I want you to take. Comparing ourselves to others is not necessarily bad. Or even thinking I'm behind, or I'm not where I wanna be. It doesn't necessarily mean that that is an awful thought that we shouldn't have. It is what we do with the thought that will empower us, connect us to our desires, show us the skills we wanna develop, inspire us to get better and grow and evolve.
Or we can also use those same thoughts to feel small, to feel less than, to feel that we have to rush and catch up so we can prove our worth. That's the choice we have. And I think if we look at our lives, not as a race with other people, but only as a race with ourselves, of us moving every day towards the human beings, we wanna be. To having the businesses that we wanna have and we use other people for inspiration, for pointing maybe blind spots, for showing us maybe skills that we didn't know we had to develop. That is the best way to use that comparison as fuel for our own dreams. All right, my friends, I really love being with all of you here, 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 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!
