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, welcome back. This is episode 94 of The Visionary's Pursuit podcast. Every week, I spend hours coaching my clients who are top executives or business founders, and one of the things that I admire the most about them is their capacity to solve problems. Their days are filled with meetings of people coming to them for answers, of them having to make decisions with incomplete information.
They're managing very different personalities, a lot of times tough personalities in their clients or their employees, and they're constantly navigating competing priorities. But what I also know is sometimes they're so close to the problem they're facing, they're not seeing it clearly. they can spend hours analyzing, talking with other people in their team about it, trying to find more information to make the right decision, and find themselves stuck in the same place.
Recently, I've been working on a client who that's what's happening to her. She's trying to make a decision on hiring a very senior person for her company, and she's been going back and forth and back and forth. And the reason this happens is not because they're not capable of solving the problem, but it's because even the highest performers have blind spots.
There's even a quote that's, that I've heard multiple times, sometimes attributed to Einstein, although that's not been confirmed, that says something along the lines of, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
And sometimes the way we're thinking about a problem, it's not the best way. In fact, sometimes the way we think that has created a lot of success is the same type of thinking that can keep us stuck. And I believe that here is where coaching can be incredibly valuable.
Because a coach is not a mentor. Mentors are people who have done what you've done before and are coming to you to tell you how to do it, to give you advice. And honestly, can we talk about how much advice we're all receiving all the time from other friends, colleagues, people that work with us, our board, even social media is filled with people telling us what to do, and that's not what I do in coaching. In coaching, I'm not going to be advising you. I'm going to be creating a space for you to step outside the pressure, question the assumptions that are shaping your current decisions, and see options that may be difficult to recognize when you're so close to the problem
So what I wanna do with this episode is explain how coaching helps leaders solve real business problems. I wanna tell you a little bit about how coaching is different than therapy and mentorship, what happens during a coaching session, and how one focused conversation can change your approach to a challenge, which will end up creating a change in the result.
And I also wanna tell you all about my upcoming consult week, which is an event I only offer two times a year, for an entire week, I open my calendar, and I offer free consultations for any of you who are curious about what coaching is, how can it serve you, and have the experience of getting coached by me.
This is starting next week, Monday, August 17th, and it goes through Friday the 21st. And here's what I wanna tell you. Every time I've done this event, it's been fully booked, so don't miss the opportunity. If you are an executive, a leader, a business founder, and you're wondering how coaching could support you or you're wanting to have the experience of being coached by me, go to the link and book your session ASAP because the slots get taken up pretty fast.
So let's start with what coaching is and what coaching is not. Some people ask me, "What is the difference between coaching and therapy," for example. And I wanna give you an answer that it's very general, with the understanding that there are a lot of different types of therapy and that there are a lot of different types of coaching.
But in general , therapy was created for those moments in our lives when we are struggling, when we are maybe feeling depressed, or we have high levels of anxiety, or facing some type of trauma or grief. Therapy helps us understand how our past, the relationships we had when we were kids with our family of origin, are affecting the behaviors and the ways of thinking that we have currently as adults. So therapy often looks towards your past to understand your present, and also therapists can diagnose, can say you have anxiety, you have depression.
Coaching originated in the sports world, and you can think of a professional athlete hiring a coach so they can be mentally and emotionally at their best self so they can play their best game. Also, coaching is not consulting.
When you hire a consultant, what you're asking is for expertise, for someone to come and look at the problem, and based on their frameworks and their view or their experience, tell you what to do. As a coach, I don't need to be an expert in your industry or not even in your business, because I'm not gonna be giving you advice on how to create the next strategy.
What I'm gonna help you with is for you to examine your thinking, your assumptions, your emotions, the decisions you're making, and make sure they're coming from the highest place within you. That you're not making decisions out of fear or out of hurt or out of a limiting belief
If you think about the people you have in your life, your friends, maybe your business partner, maybe people even in your board, your spouse, all of them care about you, of course. And because whatever decision you make is going to impact them, they also have an agenda for you, and this is not something bad, but they have their own thoughts and beliefs about how you should operate.
A coach is impartial. You care about. As a coach, what I care about is you, your vision, your desires, who you wanna become, and I'm always gonna be coaching you from that perspective, not from what I think you should do, but from the place of the person you wanna become in order to realize your vision.
So again, coaching is not mentorship, it's not therapy, it's not consulting. Coaching is a very unique relationship, which often my clients tell me, "Hey, I love coming to coaching because I had these ideas in my head. But after spending an hour with you, I have much clarity on what I wanna do, or you're reminding me that this was actually really important for me
Or, wow, I hadn't noticed that I had a limiting belief there, that I had a blind spot there. this is useful for high performers. Because high performers, we're used to having the right answers and being capable and being able to do a lot of things on our own
We sometimes have a hard time asking for help because we have a belief that we should be able to solve everything on our own. And what that does to our mind is that it makes us really good at defending our own assumptions because we have a track record that our assumptions have worked.
But as I have had this conversation with many of my clients, they've told me, "Yeah, what I have been doing worked, and then it stopped working." And why does it stop working is because all of a sudden they're having a challenge or a vision or a goal that is so big that the way they've been thinking and operating is no longer working So in coaching, I help you see an outside perspective without me bringing my own beliefs about who you are or what you should do or bringing politics or anything like that. It's helping you discover those broader perspectives
I wanna highlight something. You don't need to arrive to coaching with a perfect question or the polished explanation of what you're doing. We sometimes start coaching by simply talking about what's going on. I mean, for sure you can bring something, a specific challenge.
But if you don't know what to bring to coaching, I got you. You are gonna start telling me about where you are in your life, or how the relationship with your employees is, or how fast your company is growing, and I'll start asking you more questions that will help me start identifying patterns in your thinking, limiting beliefs or blind spots, or how maybe fear of any kind is getting in your way.
So my people can come to me saying, "Hey, Caro, like, I am being very successful, but I'm burnt out. I'm exhausted," or, "My team depends so much on me, and I don't know how to make them more autonomous," or, "I don't know why I keep postponing this important decision." Or even sometimes people have told me, "I keep saying yes to more clients when I know I'm burning out my team, and I don't know what to do here because I want my business to grow, but I'm concerned about my team."
So you can bring something that is very broad, and together in our coaching partnership, we're gonna figure it out . often people ask me, "When is the right time to hire a coach? Like, things are going smoothly right now, maybe I don't need them." And listen, when you're in the middle of a transition, or a moment of crisis, absolutely coaching can be helpful there. But I believe that the opportunities for coaching, for growth, often show up in ordinary moments, that when we really think about them and we extract value from them, they shape how you will lead from that day on
I recently was listening to an interview on the podcast, Big Deal, where Cody Sanchez was interviewing Robert Herjavec, and he said something that I think explains one of the biggest values of coaching.
He said, "The difference between successful people and others is not that successful people don't have bad days. It's how long they allow themselves to wallow in misery." And in coaching, what we do is not necessarily becoming different about those tough moments. We're all gonna have them. It doesn't mean that you're gonna stop caring about results or about problems.
But what we do in coaching is I help you experience that disappointment or that frustration or that failure without allowing it to consume the attention you need for the next decision, for the next project you have to execute at work I want you to take a moment and think about how much time and mental energy can be lost when we're replaying difficult conversations, when a client complained and left, when we made the wrong choice and that had an impact on our team, or when we're not actively working on the problem itself, when we're thinking about it, a lot of our attention, our energy and focus is going to that, and that is not very helpful.
What I do as your coach is help you recover that capacity. The ability to, recognize where you went wrong, where maybe you made a mistake, treat it with self-compassion, and quickly find the value of that mistake or that failure and turn it into something that is gonna propel you to get to where you wanna go faster.
Sometimes people also ask me, "When do I need a coach? How do I know I need a coach?" And I think that is the wrong question because the truth is that there are so many business founders and leaders who figure it out without having a coach. I think a coach is more a desire because we wanna be at our best.
So let's talk for a moment at the cost of not having a coach. One of them I just mentioned is staying in the problems way longer than needed. It's beating yourself up and creating unnecessary suffering within yourself. It's being driven by limiting beliefs that you picked up from society that are not your authentic beliefs, but you are unaware that you have them, and that might end up creating repercussions in your team, or with your family members, or your own health.
One of the typical ones I hear is, "I need to work harder in order to be more successful," or there is an unconscious belief of scarcity, "So I need to take all the business that comes my way." And yes, from the outside, that looks amazing. Your business is growing and all that, but then important team members might quit because they're burning out.
Clients may not be receiving the best deliverables or products you have to produce. You might end up getting sick. Your relationships may end up being affected to the point that you lose them or you lose valuable moments in life. Coaching is not, "I need it." Coaching is, "I wanna be deliberate about how I want to live my life and how I wanna run this business, and I have a desire of every day becoming a better leader."
Coaching will help us avoid mistakes that can cause a lot of pain simply because we weren't aware of the way we were thinking, about the way we were making decisions. We weren't aware that fear was the part of us that was driving our decisions, the way we were being
And here is the truth about the coaching I do and what I believe. Yes, it will absolutely help you be more ambitious, have bigger dreams and a bigger vision, lead your teams better, more consciously, giving them more autonomy, knowing how to manage different personalities. It will allow you to manage your time better, to solve problems from a higher level of thinking, to operate less from fear and more from desire and your own values and the vision you have of your life. And coaching will give you something that money cannot buy.
That is the ability to get to know yourself, to be conscious about your life, to live with intention, to live with purpose, to be clear on the types of relationships you wanna have, and know how to navigate those relationships
So many people in the world today are building businesses, are leading businesses, but they're in survival mode. They're going from one meeting to the next, always keeping their brains busy with information so they can avoid and skip the discomfort of living a fulfilling life.
And in coaching, yes, we're going to talk about achievement, but those same principles, we're going to apply them so you can feel fulfilled in your life. So with this, I wanna tell you that
by the time you're listening to this episode, my calendar is already opened for Consult Week. You can find the link here in the description. My commitment to every single person I meet during Consult Week is to help them create an insight that has the potential to shift the way they're operating to a much better place, either because you're gonna get there faster, because you're gonna let go of a fear, because you're gonna become aware of a thought or a belief that is one of your current blind spots.
As I told you, every single spot gets booked every time I do this, so don't miss out. Don't be that person that at the end tells, emails me and says, "Hey, I can't find a spot available," because they're gonna be closed. Go ahead right now, book that one hour for you. Give yourself the gift of having a coach hear you, bring the decision you keep postponing, the conversation you're avoiding, or that fear that is the one that wakes you up at 3:00 in the morning, and let's look at it together.
It will be my pleasure to coach you during consult week. Don't miss out on this opportunity. I only do it twice a year, and I'm really excited to meet all of you there.
So one more time, the link is in the description. Book your time. I'm looking forward to meeting you and coaching you, and we'll keep this conversation going on our next episode next week. Have a good one
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.
