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 a business coach, and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here Hi, welcome back.
This is episode 71 of "The Visionary's Pursuit" podcast.
So I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be an entrepreneur, and to be an entrepreneur is to have a vision, a desire, a dream, and to start taking on a lot of risk with the hope that that vision or that dream will be realized. And as we all know, we take a lot of financial risk when we start investing in the business before the business can pay us back, and we also take emotional risk that I've talked about in other episodes.
We're risking being judged, being criticized, failing, being rejected. But we do it because we have this dream, because we have this vision, because we have this desire to create something that currently doesn't exist. And while we're building our businesses, we have a human brain that's trying to bring us back to what we know, to our comfort zone, and who's also scanning for threats and who has negativity bias and is telling us all the things that might not work.
And one of the areas I see many of us business founders struggle with is in the belief that our vision is going to be successful, that we will get to those revenue levels that we want, that people will buy our products and services, that our brands will grow and become known in our markets. It's very common that we have doubts because the future is unknown.
It's uncertain. But what I wanna talk about today is how can we believe in what doesn't exist yet? How do we hold belief when we are putting effort and adding value to the world and we're still not seeing the return? Which, by the way, is the normal process of building a business. Before we actually can get to the levels of return we want, we're not seeing our effort being paid back.
We probably will have little wins here and there, but we'll also have failures here and there. So how do we hold belief through it all? So the first thing is I wanna remind us all that we have the power to believe in the unknown, to believe in what's intangible, to believe in what currently doesn't exist.
And I want you to think about it in two ways. One, there's things we believe about life that we don't know if they're true or not. For example, we believe that tomorrow we're gonna be alive. We believe that our significant other is gonna stay with us. We believe we're gonna come home after a long day of work to have dinner and a warm bed.
We believe in these things even though we have no evidence or way to 100% ensure that they're going to happen We accept them as truths. And that is a really good thing, because if we couldn't accept that we're gonna be safe, that our partners are gonna stay with us, that we're gonna s- be alive tomorrow, we would all be going into anxiety crisis and suffering a lot.
But how do we believe in that? It's because we make a choice. We accept something that we cannot prove as truth. We decide that, yes, this is what's probably gonna happen. It's what most likely is going to happen. So I want you to notice first, in the most simple way, how you already have that power to believe in something that you're currently not touching or seeing or that you can 100% guarantee that's gonna be that way.
Now, I want you to also look at how sometimes for us as humans, it's easier to believe that something is not going to work. When we start having doubts about our business, when we start having doubts about being able to hire that employee that we dream of, and how easily our brain tells us a story that, you know what, that's not gonna happen, that you need to conform with something a little bit less, that you shouldn't go for plan A, but go for plan B.
But the truth is that plan B or plan A have no guarantees. It's just that we tell ourselves a story that plan B is easier or it's more tangible, or we choose to believe more in that plan B than in our real desire. So take a moment, and I want you to ask yourself, how much are you believing in your business right now?
How much are you believing in your revenue goals for this year? How much are you believing in your revenue goals for the next five years? From one to 10, if I were to ask you, how much do you believe you are going to achieve those goals, what would you say? And then I want you to ask yourself, why? Why am I believing at a four, or why am I believing at a seven, or why am I believing at an eight?
I think this is such an important question, and your answer is so valuable that I encourage you to write it down. What are all the reasons why you believe you're going to achieve your results, and what are all the reasons you believe you will get to your goal, and what are all the reasons you don't believe you're going to get to your goal?
And why it's so important to create awareness of these stories we have in our mind is because they're going to end up translating into the results we create. It is not our actions or our behaviors that show up in the results. It's the way we're thinking about the results. It's our belief that at the end of the day gets translated through our actions into our results.
I'll give you some examples. When I'm working with very new entrepreneurs who are for the first time going out there to sell their projects, to sell their products or services, I see them hesitating, not making all the calls, not networking enough to be able to make those sales. And the reason why they are not doing the work that's necessary to accomplish the result of selling, of getting those first clients, is because they don't believe it's going to happen.
And if I am telling myself this story, that I need to go and knock on this door, make this call, put myself through discomfort, without believing that there's a sale on the other side of it, I'll procrastinate. I'll come up with stories why I can't do it today or tomorrow or the next day, or why I'm just gonna make three calls this week.
So we don't take that action because we don't believe we can get to that result, and what we're doing in our subconscious mind is doing the math of, "I am going to put this amount of effort and discomfort. I'm going to risk this much emotionally or financially, and I don't believe I'm gonna get a return, so I'm not gonna do it."
Because I bet that any of these new business founders, if they 100% knew they were gonna get the sales, the revenue, the results they want to get, they would put themselves through the discomfort. But I see this happening at every other level of entrepreneurship. Business founders who have gotten some revenue, who are getting some traction, are worried that the traction is gonna stop or that they're gonna hit a wall or that maybe what they have done already has been a fluke and they don't know how to repeat it.
And when they stop believing that actually they're gonna continue growing, again, they hold back in investing in their products, in investing in their marketing, in taking bigger risks so they can continue advancing towards their goals. Even with one of my clients who... She has a very successful business, and she hesitated for months to hire another executive for her business because of the fear that she wouldn't be able to sustain the level of revenue her business has today and to be able to pay this executive, who is much more expensive than an intern or a contractor, but that is required for her to get to her next goal So as you can see, what you believe will be translated into the results that you create by your emotions and your actions.
So the first place we need to start is by becoming very aware of where are we in our belief. Are we believing at a 10? At a one? At a four? Where and why? I do this for every single launch, every new product. I sit down and I write down, how much do I believe I'm gonna be successful with this new campaign?
How much do I believe I'm gonna be able to reach my revenue goal with this new launch? And I check in with myself, and the truth is that most of the times when I do the checking, I'm not at a 10. I'm not even at an eight or a nine. I start, like every human being, with doubt. The difference is that I take the time to really coach myself, to challenge those limiting beliefs, and look at the stories my brain is presenting me that don't serve me.
So this is step number two, right? I said step number one, you write down how much you believe, and you write down why you believe that number. Second step is you get all those negative beliefs, all those limiting beliefs, all the reasons your brain is presenting to you as to why you cannot be at a 10, and you start questioning them, and you start challenging them.
Or you might find that some of those stories you have are very valuable because they require for you to change something in the offering, something in the marketing, something in the pricing. I don't know, something that it's, like, a real thing you can solve with a strategy. I just went through a process like that myself.
As we're thinking about our revenue goals for this year, which I'm thinking about them often, as you've probably heard in other episodes, I started asking myself, "Where am I in my belief? Where am I?" So I sat down and wrote all these stories my brain was presenting me as to why I couldn't achieve my goals.
And then I sat down with Andrew, who's my husband and my business partner, and we talked through them, and we challenged them. And then I brought them to my coach, and I got some coaching on it, and I spent some time in my head finding all the powerful stories, all the reasons why those limiting beliefs or those limiting thoughts weren't necessarily true.
And it's not something that happens in one moment to the next. Maybe sometimes it is like, uh, you get the awareness and immediately you s- change the way you're thinking about it and you can move forward. Other times it might require a couple of days. But what I wanna say is that spending time changing those thoughts, looking for more empowering perspectives, is 100% worth your time and your attention to it.
Because if you don't do this work right now, what's going to happen is you're going to put all the effort, you're gonna p- work hard, and you're not gonna get the result you want, and then you're gonna confirm that that limiting belief was true. I'm part of a mastermind with other coaches, and our mentor, she's...
has a very successful multimillion-dollar business. And she's been teaching us all this that I'm teaching to all of you. I've heard it before in many other coaching sessions, but really focusing to our businesses right now. And seeing her operate at the level that she's making $15, $20 million a year, and she thinks and she believes this work is the key to her success, and then doing it myself and seeing the power of it has me convinced that cleaning our mind, focusing on what actually helps us move forward, developing the belief that where we wanna go is going to happen, is fundamental.
One of my clients makes me laugh because he tells me, "So you want me to be delusional? You want me to believe in this crazy idea I have that it's so far away and I don't even know if I'm ever gonna get there?" And I say, "Well, it's as delusional to think you won't get there." Because the future hasn't been written.
So to think that it is more possible that you won't get to your goal than that you will get to your goal right now today is delusional either way, because it will depend on the effort and energy you will put in throughout the entire year. I love looking at professional athletes because they understand what I'm telling you very clearly.
If you see any professional athlete, they're not just training their bodies. If you think about what a coach is doing with the players in the locker rooms before they go out and play the Super Bowl, they're not talking about the probability of winning or how good the other team is. They're getting them pumped up.
They're empowering to believe that their win is right there. In fact, I heard they bring different speakers and different people to give them that energy, that belief that the win is possible. Mariana Pajón is a BMX cyclist from Colombia, and I admire her a lot, and she has done incredible things in her career.
She has won two gold medals. And listening to her in an interview once, it stuck with me how before she starts the race, w- weeks before she goes into a race, she walks the track, and every few meters she stops and she imagines herself being the first one, winning, knowing how she's going to jump or take that turn in first place because she starts putting energy and attention into the belief that she can win.
So all of us who are on this journey of building businesses, of creating our visions, let's learn from these athletes. Let's spend time working on our mind, then we can see the results that we're working so hard for. So for all of us who are on this entrepreneurial journey with all the ups and the downs and the challenges, working on our belief will take us beyond what any other strategy can take us.
So let's all learn from these amazing athletes, and let's invest the time in believing in our results, because for sure it will pay off. All right, I'll see you next time.
