It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol." This is a quote from Brené Brown, and it compels me to ask you today, do you believe you can grow a successful business while still having plenty of free time? Or do you believe that the more hours you put into your business, the more successful it will become?
And if you believe that, when do you finally get to enjoy the freedom you're working so hard to create? That's what we're talking about today, what it takes to believe that you can actually grow a successful business that leaves you time to live, to enjoy your life. I'm Carolina Zuleta, and this is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast. Let's get started.
Hi, friends. On September 16th and 17th, I'm teaching a masterclass called Six Founder Habits Costing Your Freedom: How to Reclaim Your Time Without Slowing Your Company's Growth.
If you're feeling exhausted, trapped by your business, or guilty about how little time you have with your loved ones, I want you to know that that can change, and that change begins with awareness. The habits that keep your business dependent on you. This class is your first step toward reclaiming your time while you help your company grow.
Go to the link in the description to learn more and save your seat. I look forward to seeing you there. the core of everything I teach my clients and the way I coach them is the Self Coaching Model. This is a model created by Brooke Castillo, the founder of the Life Coaching School, where I got certified as a coach. And this model explains the relationship that exists between our beliefs and our thoughts and the results we create.
To give you a brief summary, the model says anything you believe in or you think about creates the feelings you experience in a daily basis. Stress, excitement, commitment, all the emotions that we can feel. And those emotions drive our actions. As human beings, we don't act rationally. We are emotional beings, and then we use our reason to justify our actions. That's studied in psychology. So what we think creates how we feel. What we feel drives what we do. And what we do ultimately creates the results we have in our life, in our business, in everything that we have. So if we start with the belief that it's impossible to grow a successful business while having a lot of free time, we are not going to take the actions and make the hard calls and make the decisions that lead to freedom.
I live in an interesting crossroads. In part of my life is the world of coaching, where I know so many different coaches. And in that world, working less hours, having a lot of freedom is a status symbol, right? Like, Everyone wants to have the three-day week and work twenty hours only or something like that.
But I also am part of a lot of groups who are in corporate, who are successful business founders, and in that world, a lot of the time it's a conversation of "Oof, I've put an eighty-hour week. We're working so hard. We have all these things happening," is what is admired.
And I think that we need to ask ourselves, what is it that I value most? Can I be okay living in a world where maybe a lot of people around me are bragging or, sharing that they feel successful because of the long hours they're working, or even sometimes it's actually bragging about how tired I am. I had a client, and we were laughing because she was telling me about how with her husband at night, that's what they do. They brag to each other who is more tired.
I want you to reflect, how often are you having that conversation of the long hours you're working, of how much you're putting into your business, and notice if that makes you feel good, if there is a satisfaction of telling the story that you work really hard. Or even notice if you maybe sometimes are bragging or in a competition like my client says of who is more tired.
Because although that story is so accepted in our society, it's tricky. And like I was explaining at the beginning, whatever we think and what we believe is the results that we create. So take a moment to really notice and ask yourself, "Do I wanna be working this amount of hours? Do I wanna feel this tired?
What if there could be another way?" And to start that other way, I would need to actually question my beliefs and start creating a belief that I can have a very successful business and grow it to where I wanna take it, while also having a lot of time to rest, to play, to do nothing, to not be productive
And I wanna tell you very transparently that I'm in this journey with you. I have been exploring my relationship with time deeply, and I have noticed that for me, a lot of my self-esteem comes from being productive. And when I'm not being productive, it feels like, "Oh no, I'm not living up to my expectations. I'm not living up to my f- fulfillment." And I'm in the process of questioning that, of getting to a belief, to a place where I can have a perspective about time and my life that gives me more fulfillment
The other conversation I often hear is people wanting passive income, wanting to start a business and do nothing with it and just have money come in the door. I think that's also a fallacy because I do believe our businesses need our love and attention and care and time. Now, but in one extreme is the people who are thinking, "I need to kill myself in order to grow a business, don't have weekends, don't have evenings, you know, in 10 years I'll see my family again."
And on the other extreme are the people who are expecting the business to grow without any of their involvement. I think you wanna ask yourself, what is it that you genuinely want? and with this, I'm not saying that if you want to work all those hours and you're totally fine putting your personal life on hold while you grow a business because your goal is speed and get to an exit as soon as possible, that's okay. But I want you to make sure that it's something you're choosing consciously and that's what you want, And not simply something you're doing because you've accepted that that's the only way of doing it without questioning it.
When I was at the University of Chicago, the way they taught entrepreneurship was always thinking about the exit strategy.
You hadn't even created a product, and in the business plan, you included your exit strategy, where you're gonna get acquired, where you wanna go public And for me, I had a hard time because in a coaching business, I wasn't sure what my exit strategy was gonna be. I wanted to grow a successful business that allowed me to live a very fulfilling life with plenty of flexibility to be with my family, while also making really good money that we can enjoy a lot of luxuries in this life.
I love money. But I think this is a really good conversation for us to have. What is the business you're building?
In the book, "The Infinite Game," Simon Sinek builds on philosopher James Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games. So the way he explains this is the following: a finite game is that one which we know the players, there are fixed rules, there's a clear endpoint.
You can think of any sports, a football match, a soccer match. You know what the rules are, you know there's this number of players, there's a timer, and there's a way to determine who wins the game. There's a winner and a loser.
On the other hand, an infinite game has changing players and changing rules, and there is not a clear finish line You can think about this as life. Yes, one day we're going to die, but nobody's gonna win the best lived life award. Or if you live the best w- life, it doesn't mean that then someone is gonna live the worst life, right?
So, Sinek applies this idea to businesses, and I see it so clearly. I have some of my friends who are building businesses, but they're just building it with the intention of getting acquired, with the intention of being able to exit and make millions of dollars, and that's more of a finite game. "Okay, I'm building this, and here's how I win. Here are the rules. It's about making a lot of money." But there's also the way of creating businesses that are playing the infinite game, and I think about Lego, right? It's such a beautiful company that has lasted years and years, and Lego wasn't built to be sold to make a lot of money.
It was built to create something exceptional that could last throughout a lot of time. And people have come into Lego, and they've given their best, and they've added value, and then those people have left, but the game of Lego is still on. It's still being played. Apple is another company that's a beautiful example of that.
Even Steve Jobs is gone, but the company continues to pursue the vision of creating technology that is, you know, at the leading edge, that is breaking barriers, that is transforming culture, that is creating things we've never seen before. So I want you to ask yourself, what is the game that you're playing?
Are you playing a finite game? And what are the rules of that? What is it that you're sacrificing or you're giving up to play that game? And also, I want to invite you to consider the possibility that you can play an infinite game, and that infinite game is not about speed. It's not about working 80 hours.
It's not about just going as fast as you can, but it's about building something of value, something that lasts. It's about affecting the culture in your company. It's about you living a great life while you build this beautiful business. But in order to do that, you need to be able to believe that it is possible, that you can be very successful in your business, make an impact, impact the employees that are coming through your business, at the same time, while you're living a very fulfilling life in which you have time for rest and play and your family
I know I already asked you this question, but I really want you to even pause the podcast here and be honest with yourself. What is it that you believe? Because the stories that our brain creates for us seems so obvious. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna have freedom when Christmas comes. I'm gonna have freedom in two months when we hire these people. I'm gonna have freedom or free time when this happens. But if you take a moment and you look to your past, has that been true? Or when you look to your past, every time you've achieved a milestone, has a new one shown up? One of the beautiful characteristics of successful entrepreneurs and business people is that we're really good at delaying gratification.
So we set goals for ourselves. We work really hard. We feel so committed. By the time we achieve that goal, we already are thinking about the other goal. So for us, it's easy to say, "Well, I'll play or I'll rest when I achieve this goal
The problem is when we get there, we do the same thing. We keep delaying our gratification. And listen, learning to delay gratification is fundamental to grow a business because if not, we would be frustrated all the time because as we all know, there's a lot of time that goes by in which we're not being successful or we're not achieving our goals, and we need to learn how to postpone and work hard and get to that place..
But We also have to be careful that delaying gratification doesn't mean we'll delay gratification forever, and that we'll stay in this cycle of, "Okay, yes, in two months. Oh yeah, in the summer. Yeah, in Christmas. Oh, next year. Oh, when we get this employee or when we get this capital, then I'm going to rest."
And we actually start enjoying our play and our time as we go for those goals. But it starts with our beliefs. So what is it that we need to believe in order to grow our business and experience freedom and experience free time and play and rest? And the first thing is to understand what is our job, and that our jobs and our contribution to the business is not the hours we're putting in it. And yes, there are gonna be weeks that we're gonna work hard, but that's not the same as believing that the only way to be successful is to put a lot of hours
What we need to ask ourselves is, where is it that my biggest contribution to the business goes? And for most of us as entrepreneurs, is creating a vision, selling the vision to the team, hiring the right people, and creating an environment where those people can succeed at what they are best.
There's another amazing book called Who Not How, written by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. And in this book, the authors explain that when we wanna achieve a goal or when we wanna solve a problem, the first question shouldn't be, "How do I do this?" But instead, we should ask ourselves, who can help me or do this for me? What they explain is that finding the right person saves time and unlocks growth.
And this also reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who's a business founder, and we're talking about how we sometimes think as a business founder that we are the best person to do everything, that our ideas are the best, that our answers are the correct ones.
But who said that? Because we started the business doesn't mean that we have all the right answers. There are a lot of people who are very successful and smarter than us and more capable than us in different areas. What if our job was to bring them together? What if our job was to find the right people?
Because when we have the right team, we don't feel like the business depends on us. Yes, we're leading it, we're guiding it, we're making sure it's going in the direction we want, but the business can also grow without us putting the hours into it. The business can grow while we're reading another book, while we're playing with our children, while we're going on vacation with our family or our friends, or when we're simply sitting and looking at a sunset.
What if having time to work out every day, to pick up your kids at school, to have an afternoon coffee with a friend, to maybe even sleep in or not work at all, be unplugged during the weekends is a possibility for you. What if that is the result of the way you design your business? And the way you design your business comes from the belief of what is possible for you and your business.
And it might feel counterintuitive because we also need to be aware that we live in a culture that is pushing us to work more hours, to go faster, to get the places we wanna get in a shorter period of time. And we are built as human beings thinking that we have the right answers, that we are required.
There is a need for us to feel significant, to feel that others depend on us or need us. That feels good for us as human beings. And it's that whole construction of our belief systems that we need to challenge in order to become the CEOs and founders that create businesses that have freedom as part of the design.
So is it possible to grow a successful business while enjoying your freedom? Here's the thing. It is not automatic. It will require self-awareness, paying attention to your own behaviors and beliefs. It will require having difficult conversations. It will require looking at your blind spots, having fewer priorities, being more intentional and clear on where is it that you add the most value.
And of course, there's gonna be periods of time where you will work harder because a very specific event, but that's not gonna be the norm. I really know that this is possible with intention and courage.
It really makes me sad sometimes when I talk to so many people who are exhausted, who are going through life in survival mode, doing one thing after the other, when I know also this life is so short, and that there's also the possibility of really enjoying it. So if this resonates with you, go enroll in the master class, sign up, put it in your calendar, and start choosing that journey for you. All right, my friends, it's always a pleasure to be with all of you here. I'll see you next week. Bye.
