Welcome to Visionary 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, and welcome back. This is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast, and today is episode 68.
I love my clients. I love entrepreneurship. I love the idea that we can create something from nothing, add value to the world, make money, make an impact, create jobs. I think it's the most amazing thing that we can start our own businesses, and therefore, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. And I think as an entrepreneur, there are two things that could be really hard.
The first is when our business is not going as we expected or intended to, so we're not getting clients, we're not getting sales, it's growing slowly, or we might even be losing clients, losing opportunities, and that can create a lot of emotions, pressure, stress. The other thing that also is hard for entrepreneurs is when our business is going very well, when we're getting tons of clients, we're expanding, we're growing, and we still don't have the infrastructure ready for that growth.
Maybe we haven't hired the employees we needed. Maybe we're still trying to figure out our systems or processes, and that can create a lot of pressure, stress, you know, a feeling that you have to continue performing well, a fear of what if all this success leaves? What if I then lose the clients I have or the momentum stops?
And what I have noticed is that in either of those situations, our most common response is to work harder, to push ourselves even when we're tired, to put more hours, to put more effort, to almost, like, hold our breath and white-knuckle through it, like, all the pressure, and tell ourselves a story that one day it's gonna feel easier, that soon you're not gonna have that much work, that you're not gonna have that amount of pressure on you.
But the truth is that that doesn't usually happen. Yes, with more work and effort, maybe you turn your business around and it starts making more money, or, you know, by pushing hard, maybe you do get to a place that your business is slowing down a little bit and you get to get a breath. But the price we pay for just working harder, for pushing ourselves is big in many ways.
First, around our health, around our relationships, right? When we're spending so much time at work, when we're pushing ourselves so hard, there are other things in our personal life that we're abandoning or we're not putting that much effort, and they're suffering. But also there's a big price for your business because when you are pushing yourself in that way, when you are operating from stress and fear and anxiety, you are not accessing the highest level of thinking. You are not making the best decisions for your business, and probably you're not delivering the best results for your clients or even for your employees.
In the last year, I've helped my clients who have been going through those moments, those moments of high stress, high pressure. And, you know, as one of my clients was telling me, she has built her business bigger than she ever dreamed of. In some way, she feels so proud of the results she's created.
She's amazed by the amount of money she's making, the number of clients, the type of clients she's getting, by the awards she's received, the recognition she's received, and yet her most common feeling is dread. Dread of the amount of work, dread of the amount of hours, dread of feeling exhausted and tired and never seeing when this is going to stop And also, although, you know, she's doing a fantastic job and clients are getting the results she's promised and they're happy, she feels she's been compromising some of the values that are so important to her and her business.
For example, supporting employees to have a work-life balance. She knows she's been pushing them so hard that they're not living their best life either. They're also tired, stressed, exhausted. She believes in treating her customers in the most incredible way, and she's not having time to really listen to their feedback, integrate it, process it, delight them and surprise them with things that are gonna make their experience so wonderful because she's putting one fire after the other out, going so, so fast that, you know, it's like if you're going in a car that's going so fast but it hasn't fully been built and you start feeling that one wheel is squeaky and then the other one, and you're like, "Oh, my gosh, when will this car fall apart?"
That's a little bit her feeling. And if we look at the story that she's been telling herself is, "Two more weeks and we'll be done. Let's finish this project, and then we'll get a break. Oh, when we complete this thing for this client, then things are gonna slow down." But the truth is that things are not slowing down because her business has a lot of momentum, and she continues to say yes to new work.
And it's not that she doesn't know what she needs to do. She knows she needs to hire new people. She knows she needs to slow down the amount of projects she's getting every month while she, you know, rebuilds her systems, rebuilds her team. But the reality is that when is she gonna have time to hire people?
When is she gonna have time to write job descriptions, meet with recruiters, do interviews if she's so enveloped in her business? And she knows that she probably has enough money right now in her business to turn down some work and give her some time to fix the internal machinery. But when those requests for new projects are coming from existing clients, the fear of disappointing them, the fear that if she says no to one more request, they might leave her, keeps her going.
So as you can see, the problem for many entrepreneurs, we all think it's like a strategy problem. Well, hire more people, or do- use this tactic, or do this thing, and yes, that is part of the problem. But what I love about coaching is that we go a little deeper, and we understand that there are strategies and tactics we need to do to get our business to the other side of this challenging moment.
But what we get to see so clearly is that whatever the problems the business is having, they correlate to the capacity the owner has. As a business founder, you will be the visionary, the driver, the dreamer, and the possibility creator for your business, and also you will be the bottleneck, the ceiling that stops your business from growing more or that gets stuck in certain cycles that are not healthy.
So what do we do? What do we do when either a business really needs to go through an internal transformation so it can start getting more clients and growing again, or when it's growing so fast that we can keep up with it? We have to look inside. Hustling, working harder, more hours, pushing everyone, trying to do everything fast is a fear response.
It's our automatic system saying, "Oh, we have this threat. Let's just work on it really hard, and let's go for it." What I wanna talk about today is how to build capacity. Capacity is a strategic decision we make within ourselves as the founders that will end up having a big impact on the business. Your capacity is not who you are.
It's not a personal trait. It's not a fixed characteristic. Your capacity is a set of leadership skills that you can develop, that then they shape how you think, how you decide, how you lead, especially in those challenging moments. Our automatic response is pushing yourself, denying some of your personal needs, using adrenaline and cortisol to fuel you.
Capacity is, yes, you might work hard. Yes, you might work long hours, but the fuel you use to accomplish those challenging tasks is not fear. It's not anxiety. It's not cortisol. It's desire. It's vision. You can think about hustling as fear management and capacity as a combination of powerful decision-making, desire, and self-trust.
So what I've been doing with my clients in our coaching sessions is not helping them to hustle more, but it's teaching them how they can expand the capacity so they can become the founders, the leaders that can resolve the challenges they have right now.
Most founders and leaders focus on the action part, the behavior part, the what do we need to do? What's the strategy? Who do we hire? They pay consultants to fix the problem or to tell them the, what the problem is when they already know what it is. But not a lot of us make the time to really assess how is our inner leadership?
How is our internal operating system? Are we performing as the leaders and the business founders and the visionaries our businesses need for this moment? Or are we allowing our fears, our emotions, our capacity sometimes to be fully empowered to drive the decisions we're making, and at the end really costing us money and real life consequences in our business.
And really, bottom line of the message I wanna share with all of you today, business problems don't get solved only with strategy or hiring more people. They get solved by you, by your capacity to make the right decisions.
Not more decisions, but the ones that are gonna have the biggest impact, by you being able to stay stable under pressure and not make decisions out of fear, but out of vision. You, your brain, is your business' biggest asset, and knowing how to manage it is what's going to allow you to grow your business beyond your wildest dreams.
All right, I'll see you next time. 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/consult. That is C-A-R-O-Z-U-L-E-T-A.com/consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me.
See you there.
