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 84 of The Visionary's Pursuit podcast, and today I'm gonna start with an invitation I'm very excited about. So this year, I'm gonna be leading a series of different mini workshops, different courses that I was inspired to create by looking at my clients and seeing those themes, those areas where most of them are making changes, where they're growing, and where we're seeing the most exceptional results for themselves and their businesses.
So the first mini course is gonna be called the Self-Led CEO, and in this course what we're going to be exploring are the upgrades we need to make in our identity, the way we think, the way we operate, in order to scale our business, to 10X our business, without that meaning that we need to work 10 times harder.
But actually growing our businesses in the smart way, in the way that is sustainable and that brings the best results. And this first one, I'm doing it for free because I really want all of you to acquire these ways of thinking, because my goal is that as a community, we continue growing our businesses, having a bigger impact, making more money, and living more fulfilling lives.
So again, the course is gonna be five days long. It starts on Monday, and it's 20 minutes every day. So I also made it 20 minutes because I know we're all busy, but I think we can take 20 minutes to learn something that is gonna 10X the results in our business. So to enroll in it, go to the link here in the description of the episode.
Put your name and email. It's free, but you do need to enroll. And you can think about today's episode as the intro to that course. I wanna share some thoughts I have about how we manage our time, what culture tells us about time management that I think we all need to adjust. We need to challenge what we've learned and think in a way so, again, we can expand our leadership, grow our businesses, and at the same time, enjoy our lives.
Because if we chose to be entrepreneurs, It's not about creating another job for ourselves, but it's about really experiencing the freedom I think most entrepreneurs want. So some years ago, one of my mentors told me, "Listen, if you're working more than 40 hours a week, you don't have a time problem. You have a leadership problem." And at the moment, it felt confronting because, you know, when we're working 50, 60, 70 hours a week, we usually don't think that we have a leadership problem.
What we think is, "Well, I have too much to do. It's a new business, and there's all these things that need to happen." Or we can be critical of ourselves. "I'm not very good at time management," or what happens is, "I need more discipline. I need to wake up earlier. I need to manage my calendar better." Or we even tell ourselves, "You know what? It's just a season. This is some months that I'm working really, really hard, but then it's gonna get better." But the reality is that unless we transform something within ourselves, some way in which we look at time and we understand the identity we've created as the CEO of our businesses, we are gonna continue experiencing 50, 60, 70-hour weeks because it's actually not a calendar problem.
It's not a time management problem. It is a leadership or self-identity problem.
I like to think that our calendar is the mirror reflecting back to us our level of leadership. It's showing us how much our business and our team still depends on our own capacity.
So today I wanna go deeper into a concept that Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy talk about in their book, "10X Is Easier Than 2X," and that I really think points to the core issues most of my clients, me included, we need to grapple with. We need to really look at deeply so we can become 10X CEOs and not just CEOs who are working harder and harder to 2X our businesses, to 2X our revenue, to double the size of our business.
As always, the first coaching question I want you to ask yourself is, how many hours am I working every week, and what is the story I'm telling myself as to why I'm working those hours? Am I making up a story that it's a me problem in terms of my discipline, my character, my inability to manage time?
Are you telling yourself the story that it's like this until something happens? Are you normalizing it by saying, "Yeah, of course, entrepreneurs have to work hard, and working hard means working lots and lots of hours because you're starting a business." Or if you're even a little bit more sincere, you're telling yourself that you have to work hard because if you're not working hard, maybe you're lazy, maybe you're not good enough, maybe you're not doing enough for the business.
So get honest with yourself. How many hours are you working, and what is the story you're telling yourself about why you're working that number of hours?
In the book, "10X is easier than 2X", the authors present the idea that 10X growth is not about 10 times more work or 10 times more time in the business, that it's actually the opposite, that it's actually about doing less, that it's actually about just doing the right things at a higher level. They make that differentiation. They talk about how when we're in 2X mindset, we ask ourself questions like, "How can I do more?"
Or, "How can I squeeze more into the calendar? How can I be more efficient? How can I work harder? How can I get more out of myself?" And we also say yes to more things. Versus when we're in 10X mindset, the questions we ask ourselves are, "What needs to be removed? What needs to be delegated? What needs to be upgraded?
What don't I have to do? Who else could do this? Who else could do this better than how I'm doing it?"
What are the structures that I need in place to make this growth sustainable? 10X mindset is about removing things off your plate, while 2X mindset is about adding things to your plate. And this reminds me of something Warren Buffett said, and this might not be the exact quote, but he said something like this: "When I was successful, I said no to a lot of things.
When I became really, really successful, I said no to most things." And saying no to most things is that 10X mindset.
Because 10X is about simplification, hiring better people, creating better systems, upgrading your own standards, And something we don't talk enough about in entrepreneurship is adding more and more recovery.
One of the things that the book says that I'm challenging myself to do within the next year is to have 150 days of recovery time. And I know for so many of us, that sounds insane, but I'm actually challenging myself. How could I do that? How would I organize my calendar to have 150 days off?
So the idea that a work week is 40 hours is something someone made up. And it's not that that's right or wrong, but let's say that in the US it's what's, you know, accepted as a normal work week.
But I think it's a good filter or a good standard to compare how many hours we're working a week towards that. Yeah, And it's not just working, but how many hours you're giving attention to your business.
And 40 hours, again, it's just one framework. It's a number that we can use not to shame ourselves. I really believe that anything that creates shame for us just keeps us stuck. Or even to say, "Ah, I'm doing something wrong." But to have a parameter to check in with ourselves , "How is it that I'm doing?
How am I spending my time?" It's about using your calendar and numbers like 40 hours as information to help you evaluate how you are currently thinking about yourself, how you're currently thinking about your business, how you're currently thinking about your time. So 40 hours is just a number that is gonna help us ask deeper questions.
Deeper questions such as: Where am I being a bottleneck right now? Am I making too many decisions? Is there anyone else who should be making these decisions? One that I think is so important, am I hiring people just for relief, or am I hiring people who can truly take ownership of what they're doing?
You know, one of the concepts in 10X again is that we hire people who could do certain tasks that we've been doing better than we can do them ourselves. And in comparison, I've seen a lot of new entrepreneurs when they're making hiring decisions, Hiring people that are more junior so they can pay them less and telling themselves that they will train these new employees.
But if you think about it, your plate is already full of things and you're hiring someone to train them, that means you're putting more work on your plate. I would argue that many times making the investment on hiring someone who's at a higher level, who has more experience, who can do the task that you're delegating better than you can, is what actually is gonna move the business 10X instead of, you know, creating even more bottlenecks while you train the new person, right?
That's why, you know, I love internships, but why are you hiring interns? Because interns require a lot of your time and attention because they're just learning.
So the number of hours we work, our calendar, you can think about it as the tip of the iceberg, the deeper question I think it's very important for all of us to ask is how much of my business is still depending on my own personal capacity.
Working with multiple CEOs and leaders and visionaries, I think one of the things I would say is that My clients who are amazing, who are doing incredible things in the world, have a bias for action. It amazes me how often I will have a coaching session with a client, and then I will suggest a book or I'll suggest taking some action, and by our next session, which is only a week away, they've done so much.
Because in general, I would say that usually leaders and CEOs, that's what we do. We execute, we get things going, we make things happen. And yet the other side of the coin is when we start over-functioning.
Over-functioning is the thing that we do when we feel pressure. And instead of slowing things down, building the structures, training the teams, hiring the right people, elevating the standards, what we do is we give our business more of our time, more of our energy, more of our capacity. Because guess what?
We can. We can, as CEOs, do so much, and we're fast, and we can make fast decisions, and we can execute like nobody else, or that's at least what we tell ourselves. But the problem is that in the long term, those things we did right now to make things happen continue to depend on us until either we burn out because we're exhausted, we passion or we lose energy for our business, or the business doesn't continue to grow at the pace we want because it doesn't have the resources required.
You can think of o-over-functioning as when we use our bias for action too much. When the business starts repeatedly borrowing from the CEO's energy and capacity instead of building the structure, the team, the standards, and the decision-making muscles so it can grow on its own. Now, if you're over-functioning, it doesn't mean that you're doing everything.
It means that you're doing things that although you're very capable of doing and you could do them very fast, you shouldn't be doing. Someone else on your team should be doing that because the most important thing you can do for your business is use your brain.
You know, One of the ways I've seen over-functioning show up for CEOs is that in their brains, they see the future so clearly, and they know what needs to change. They understand their business, and they know the business can't keep operating a certain way.
But instead of slowing down enough to bring the team along and clarify the strategy and delegate the pieces that need to change and let people build their own ownership about them, the CEO starts carrying the whole transformation by themselves. So they become the ones that are driving the change, who are, you know, doing the things, learning how to do them while they're changing.
They start protecting the team from the discomfort that change brings. So they start working later during the weekends, and they think that that's how they're moving faster, and they think that that's how they're protecting the team. But in reality, what's happening is that they're gonna slow everything down because at the end of the day, they're the only ones who know how to do it.
And the team is gonna be feeling left out, confused, lost, feeling like they're working on something, and then the CEO is coming and changing things. So they might even come into a place that they start doubting themselves, their ability to do things. And then that's when people unconsciously may start developing the belief that, "You know what?
Well, the CEO got it, so I don't have to put as much effort," or, "Why would I work so hard if they're gonna change it anyways?" And you start creating a team that instead of taking ownership of what they're doing, they start depending on you.
Let me give you some tangible examples for this. There's an opportunity to send a proposal to a new client. And instead of sitting with the team and translating all your ideas and reviewing their work and helping them create that proposal, you sit down and do it on your own.
Or you're with a client, and the client is presenting some challenges, and instead of you slowing it down and saying you'll come back to the client once you talk with your entire team, you make decisions or you make promises right there that then the team is trying to catch up. You end up fixing the deck in the middle of the night.
You end up answering the question that someone else in your team might be able to answer. You start solving problems in the moment by putting your time, going in and doing things versus leading the team to do those things.
So I want you to take a moment here and notice if you ever tell yourself, "Well, if it's faster, I'll do it." If you're noticing that you have a meeting planned to do something and you come up with a new idea, and then you completely change the deck without telling everyone, and when you show up to the meeting the next day, everyone is surprised by the changes you made.
Or if you're not giving people enough time to add their contributions to your idea, to your changes, or even to push back. If any of these things are happening, I want you to ask yourself if you might be over-functioning. And one of the things I've learned from Brené Brown is that we tend to over-function as a way to manage our stress, to manage our anxiety, to even, confirm our self-worth, because w- unconsciously, we're telling ourselves, "See? I can do all these things, and the way I feel valuable is because I get a lot of stuff done."
So to summarize, you can use the 40-hour week as a standard to measure yourself against, but that number can be different.
I know some entrepreneurs who only wanna work three days a week, 25 hours a week. So choose the number that would be ideal for you to work and measure yourself against those hours. And if you're working more than those hours, notice if there's any part of you that's over-functioning.
And remember, over-functioning is When we overdo, when we use more than we should, our strategy of getting things done. So notice if you're over-functioning, and then ask yourself, why is that? What is the story you're telling yourself? And then you can start creating the identity of the version of you that only works the number of hours you wanna work.
And then you can sit down to think, what is the version of you that will work only 25 hours or only 40 hours, that will not work at nights, that will not work over the weekends?
And you can start thinking about how that version of you hires really good people, is really good at delegating, knows how to slow yourself down in order to think, values recovery more than hustle, values the time to think and proactively schedules it in the calendar, is okay with empty space in the calendar, doesn't have to fill up every minute and every second.
And what will happen is once you create this new identity, once in your brain you start thinking, "Okay, I wanna go from over-functioning to having a 10X way of managing my time," your brain is gonna create something that's called cognitive dissonance. And cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we all feel when we're trying to shift the way we behave, the way we think about ourselves, the way we do things.
At the core is when we're trying to change, we're attempting to change our identity.
So to simplify it, you can think, "Oh, I'm going from a 2X version of myself to a 10X version of myself." My 2X version has thought about how do I get things done faster? How do I add more to my plate? How do I feel good about myself because every day I was super busy? That 10X version is how do I feel super good about myself because I have ton of recovery time, 150 days off in a year.
How do I feel good about myself because I know how to hire the best people that can do the things I was doing better than I'm doing it and are adding and contributing to this company in ways that I couldn't have even imagined.
How am I noticing that in meetings with my team, I'm not the one who's coming up with all the answers? I'm the one who's creating the space for other people to come up with the answers. How am I leading by example to my team by also teaching them how to be that 10X version of themselves?
This is the work that I'm currently coaching multiple clients on, going from this 2X mindset of how to manage their time to a 10X mindset. So I wanna also share a very common mistake I see my clients make, and it's that once this concept of managing their time at a 10X hits them and they understand it and they see how valuable they are, they wanna make all the changes at once.
They want that next week they have the time to think, that time that is free. They can delegate all these tasks. But their team is not ready, the systems are not ready, plus, your agenda for next week is probably already booked with meetings and for the next month. So the steps are to notice where you are, create a new identity, feel the cognitive dissonance, but not try to make all the changes right now.
You're gonna first create a list of what are the things that you wanna delegate, that you know that they're not the best use of your time. Then you can ask yourself: Who can I delegate them to? If you don't have the right person to do that, then your next step is to hire the right person.
Then you need to train them. Then you need to set up and teach them the standard at which you want them to do those tasks, and then start letting go. So although I believe it's important to make the shift in your mind from 2X to 10X in a coaching session in just a moment, the execution, the actual making changes in your business doesn't have to happen immediately.
Because when we try to do it immediately and we can't do it, then that's when we start doubting ourselves that we can actually make that leap. That's when we stop believing that we can manage our time at a 10X. That's when we actually start reinforcing old beliefs. "See? I can't. I have to work 60 hours. There's no way." And we start looking for evidence and actually finding evidence as to why the only way to build our business is how our old self used to think about what was required to build a business.
You know, this is a conversation actually I've had with multiple clients in the last couple of weeks when they start telling me that why in their industry, why in their specific business this can't work. And they give me reasons as to what they tried and didn't work this way or the other people who are gonna be opposed to this.
And I can see how that is their old way of thinking, coming up with all the reasons to help them close the cognitive dissonance, to help them go back to the way they were doing things before. Because even if it's not the ideal way, even if it's not the way they love doing it, it's the way in which they're comfortable doing it. And so learning to hold the tension while you're making these changes into your new identity is gonna be key for you to be able to transform yourself and the way you manage your business, your time, your energy, so you can actually become the 10X version of yourself.
I know what I'm sharing in this episode makes sense and is simple, but I also wanna acknowledge that this is deep inner work. When we're shifting our identity, we're gonna be facing so many beliefs, so many behaviors, habits, the ways we were experiencing self-worth that are just hard, that are challenging to do, but that doesn't mean we cannot do them.
We can all do hard things. I just wanna name it because if you're gonna try to do this on your own and you're facing the resistance of it, to know that that is also normal. Because although in words this sounds simple, the work required to make this transition is deep, especially when we live in a world where hustled is rewarded. When we've all have grown up believing and seeing that it, you have to work so hard as an entrepreneur that, you know, if you worked hard as an employee, you're gonna work 10X times harder as a, as a business owner.
And those are the types of beliefs that are stuck in our brain that we need to start challenging and making changes to start building the evidence that the way we can actually grow our business is different than what we have considered in the past was the way to grow our business.
So next week, what I wanna do in the mini workshop is every day bring you, a specific concept so you can change in your identity or a specific tool that you can start applying in that moment.
Next week is gonna be a lot more about what to do, and today was more about, the philosophy of why we're doing these changes. So if you like this, if you're ambitious to make more money, to grow your business, to have a bigger impact, but you're also ambitious in living the most fulfilling life and enjoying your time and not feeling like you've lost your freedom because you have your own business, then this workshop is gonna guide you day by day, making small changes so you can actually see the results in your business and your day-to-day.
So remember, enroll in the Self-Led CEO, the free one-week workshop I'm gonna teach next week.
The link is in the description of this episode. And even if the time doesn't work perfectly for you, I would r- highly recommend you enroll because we will be sending and sharing the recordings so you can listen to them on your drive to work or on your drive back home or while you're at the gym.
And I'm gonna make them short and sweet so you can digest them every day with some action steps you can take, and in one week you can see a big transformation in the way you're managing your time.
So that was our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening. I love being in this journey of becoming the 10X versions of ourselves all together, and I look forward to seeing you on the training 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!
