There's a question I love asking business founders and visionaries. Their answer pretty quickly tells me if they're going to burn out as they pursue their big goals or scale their businesses. Here it is: What do you tell yourself when you're hustling, when you're working hard, but you're still not seeing the results?
If your answer is something like, "I should be further ahead. I can't afford to stay behind. I just need to work harder," I promise you, the pressure you're putting on yourself will soon turn your goal into something that you're not moving towards, but into something that you wanna run away from. Today, we're talking about sustainable grit.
What does it actually take to stay devoted to something ambitious when the results are slow and when you're doubting if you'll ever get there? I'm Carolina Zuleta. This is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast. Let's get into it. Angela Duckworth is a leading researcher on grit, and she defines grit as passion and perseverance for long-term goals.
And I love this definition because it has two components, passion and perseverance. But yet, I think we all make a very common mistake, and we think about grit as blind persistence. We tend to think that successful people don't quit. They never stop. They never slow down. They work harder. But when we go deeper into her research, we see that her definition is way more intelligent than that.
She is talking also about passion, about being able to stay connected to the purpose, to the why, why you're doing something in the long term. One of the exercises I love doing with my clients is the why exercise. When they tell me they wanna 10X their revenue, or they wanna create a brand-new business, or they wanna find a way to have way more freedom in what they're currently doing, and it really feels impossible, I ask them, "Why?
Why do you wanna do that?" And not just the superficial why, but I ask them the question seven times. "So you wanna 10X your revenue. Why?" "Oh, so I can have more money, and I can have financial independence." "But why?" "Oh, so I can feel secure, and I can travel and live the lifestyle I want." "But why?" And then as we start going deeper into these whys, people start connecting to their purpose, to what really is meaningful to them.
So understanding the why, why you're doing something, why are you gonna pursue a goal that seems so far away or so impossible, is one of the ways to develop your grit. With my clients, we joke around that once you decide to pursue a goal, you get into the river of misery because it really sometimes feels miserable.
When you're working hard, when you're putting long hours, when you're taking risk, when you're facing emotional exposure, and yet you're not getting to the result that you want. People are canceling meetings with you. The person that said, "Yes, I'm gonna start working with you on your business," all of a sudden gets another job proposal and leaves.
Or you finally hire that employee, and they're not performing like you want it to. Or maybe there is a week that you got so focused on the small things that were happening in your life and putting out fires that you felt disconnected from that bigger goal. And that is hard. It's hard for all of us to have in our brain the idea of this vision, when it's going to happen, how we imagine our goal once we realize it, and then look at our reality and see how far away we are from it.
So what I see people do is two things. They focus on the part of the definition that is just about perseverance. They say, "I need to make more calls, do more things, add more to my to-do list. I have to work faster." And they put so much pressure on themselves that their brain starts looking for, "How do I remove this pressure?
How do I let it escape?" And then they move to the other side, and the other side has comments like, "Well, you know, we did what we could. We'll see what happens." Or even some of my clients that maybe are a little bit more spiritual, they say, "Well, if it was meant to happen, it will happen," or, "If it's feeling this hard, maybe it's life telling me that this is not the path, that this is not for me."
But I want you to notice that those comments like, "Well, if it happens, it happens," or, "We'll leave it to the universe," are not necessarily true surrendering. The... Many times, they're the way that we release the tension that exists between the vision we want to see happen and our current reality. True surrender is that we surrender the result of a specific outcome.
For example, you submitted an RFP, and you worked a lot of hours with your team. You worked on it, you're proud of it, and you click the button to submit it. In that moment, there's nothing else you can do to affect the outcome. That's when you surrender, but you surrender a very specific result. Let's see if they're gonna approve this RFP or not.
Versus when we release the tension, that is not true surrender, we usually do it for bigger things like, "We'll see if this business works or not. We'll see if we'll ever get there." And we go into avoidance. We stop really engaging with our business, being creative, trying to problem solve. I know it's a thin line, but I also know that internally, we know if we are saying things like, "We'll see what happens," because we're releasing the pressure we're feeling or because truly we've come to a place that the next steps are outside of our control, and we truly are saying, "Well, we've submitted the RFP.
We're gonna see what happens." So how do you develop the grit to stay in that tension? Because the tension is not optional. The moment you set a goal, especially when the goal feels very big and ambitious and maybe even impossible, you are going to experience that tension. You're going to experience that discomfort in your body of looking at your reality and seeing that it looks so different from where you wanna go.
With my clients, we call that feeling the river of misery You've sent out proposal after proposal and people are ghosting you, not answering you or saying no, or going with your competitor. Or when you've hired finally those employees and now you have them and you're paying them, but you're finding that you again need time to train them even more.
And then you train them and they're not delivering to the level you expected them to. And there's a part of you that really wants to give up, right? That tension. So how do we stay in the tension? Let's look at the definition again. It's passion and perseverance. So in order for us to cultivate the passion, we need to understand the why, like I was telling you at the beginning of the episode.
Why are we doing this? Why is this meaningful? And I love because I discovered this by my own journey and working with my clients. But recently, I learned there's this research that did a large analysis across different studies and field studies, and what they found is that perseverance was more strongly associated with performance when people also felt connected to something personally important to them.
So this exercise of why, why am I pursuing this? Why am I willing to walk the river of misery? Is fundamental for you to develop grit, for you to connect to that, to hold onto that when the results are not there, when you're tired, when you're exhausted, when you're defeated, when you're even doubting if you could make it to the end Some time ago, I remember I was having a conversation with one of my friends because I was in the river of misery.
I was struggling with my business. The work we were putting out there was not paying off, at least in that moment. And I was, seriously, this is true, even questioning, like, "Do I wanna continue doing this? It's so hard." Even though I talk with my clients about this all the time, it took my friend to tell me, "Hey, remember this is the river of misery.
Remember that every entrepreneur goes through it," and remind me of that perspective for me to feel more comfortable continuing to be in the discomfort. And honestly, I think this is one of the benefits of having a coach, because having a coach is someone that is going to remind you when you most need it why staying in the river of misery is more valuable or it's more worthy to you than the comfort of simply letting go in that moment.
So here's what I want you to take away, is that you pay attention to the way you're thinking, to your inner conversation. And when I ask you next time, what do you tell yourself when you're hustling, when you're working really hard and you're not seeing the results? That the answer has to do something with, well, I connect to my purpose.
I remember why I'm doing this really hard thing. I take breaks. I remember that not everything has to be solved right now. Instead of building pressure inside myself, I know how to hold myself with self-compassion and kindness and support, so I can be in the river of misery for longer periods of time.
Because the reward on the other side is truly what gives us that sense of achievement and meaning and self-esteem in our lives. Have a wonderful week. Thanks so much for tuning in. Bye.
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