βFor years, doctors, mentors, coaches have told me, "You need to slow down. You're going too fast." But how do we slow down when we look at the week ahead and it's packed with client meetings, deadlines, endless to-do lists, demands from your kids' schools, friends inviting us to do social events?
How do we slow down in a world that seems to be going faster and faster every day? That has been my journey, and today I wanna share with you what I've been discovering, what I've been learning. And learning to slow down may very well be your competitive advantage. I'm Carolina Zuleta. This is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast
The first time I heard someone tell me I needed to slow down, I was 25 years old, and in one week I got a flat tire in my car, a flat tire in my bike, and I injured my foot, so I was using crutches. And I remember a friend telling me, "Caro, you should slow down.
What if this is the universe telling you that you're going too fast?" And as woo-woo as that may sound, it stuck with me. I am going too fast. But how do I slow down? Not only because I had a lot of things that I needed to do, but because I didn't wanna slow down. I'm an ambitious person. I've always had this feeling that there's so much I wanna create and experience and achieve, that slowing down seemed incompatible with my desires
Then I became a mom, and my experience of being a mom has been amazing. But I'm almost 10 years into it, , and one of the things I've noticed that it has done for me is that my sense of responsibility and my to-do list have increased so much that my brain is in a constant loop of all the things I need to do. Remember to get the doctor's appointment, to cut their nails, to get these things from school, plus my to-do list of all the things from my work, and thinking about all the things that need to happen in a family in order for us to live.
And I even have this memory of breastfeeding my youngest one and having her on my chest while at the same time I'm on my phone paying things, sending messages, getting the painter that needed to fix something in my house, planning the birthday party of my other kid, and this feeling of always on the go, on the go, on the go.
So again, this conversation about slowing down is in my life, and it's present, and I'm sitting with it, and I'm really wanting to understand it. So here's what I now understand. Yes, there is a slowing down of simply doing less things, of having more free time, more time in your calendar that is not scheduled. That's a part of it. But that's not the type of slowing down that I wanna talk about today.
What I'm discovering is a new form of slowing down, and it happens in an instant. It doesn't happen because you canceled meetings and you have space in your calendar, but it's because you actually took a couple minutes, to take a couple of deep breaths and slow yourself down and connect to yourself and notice what is happening inside.
A big part of what I teach is around emotions. And even though I work with visionaries and leaders, there are so many beliefs about bringing our emotions to work, that we should keep them at home, that it should be only in our personal life. What I know is that as human beings, we are feelers.
We are emotional beings. There is no way to separate us from our emotions, and yet so many of us try to do that.
And we do that by numbing ourselves, by getting even more busy in our heads.
So
the moment we have space, we're waiting for someone at a restaurant, we're waiting in line, we feel like we need to pull up our phones, listen to something scroll, read an email.
We wake up, and we don't even allow ourselves a couple of minutes to fully wake up. We turn around, we grab our phone, we start checking our email. And immediately life starts speeding up, and it starts speeding up within ourselves. And what the consequence of that is that we start disconnecting from who we are.
Our heads get filled up with so much noise, so much information. I don't know about you, but sometimes I have this feeling that I go to Instagram and it's a bunch of people telling me how to live my life, how to eat, how to organize my house, how to be a better parent, how to plan my va- vacations, the places in the world I need to go to.
We're filling our heads with more and more and more information and more things to do
But what if we don't need more people telling us what to do? Even though that's what I do in this podcast. I offer you ideas and concepts for you to apply in your life. But what if the biggest guidance we have is our inner wisdom? It's that little whisper we all have inside our intuition that is telling us what is it that we need at each moment Our life is going so fast that sometimes we don't even go to the bathroom, and we ignore the bodily signals that are telling us what we need. or drink enough water or go to the bathroom.
We train our brains to override those biological needs and cues that are telling us what we need, the most basic things and our brains are powerful, and if we train them to stay on the go, go, go, they will stay on the go, go, go until sadly many of us get stopped because we get an illness or something really big and life-threatening can happen But what if we don't allow ourselves to get to that place, and instead we learn how to slow down every day?
To slow down multiple times throughout the day. To have moments where we put our phones down, turn our computers off, put our hands on our chest, take a couple of deep breaths, and ask ourselves, "What do I need? How am I feeling?" And here's what I've noticed in many of my clients, in myself, in my friends, is that there are certain emotions that none of us want to feel.
We don't wanna feel hurt, we don't wanna feel insecure, we don't wanna feel doubt, we don't wanna feel sadness. So we numb those emotions. We numb them by staying busy, by going into our heads. But the problem is that when we numb those uncomfortable emotions, we're also numbing happiness and joy and gratitude.
So we start going through life feeling numb, not feeling anything, not one way or the other. And when we disconnect from our emotions and we're just feeling stress, pressure, urgency, getting to the next thing We have this connected to an inner wisdom that I believe we all have that is gonna give us information that is the idea we might need for our business, or it's gonna give us the intuition that something might be happening in our relationship that we hadn't noticed before or with our kids, or it's gonna guide us to our deepest heart needs of connection and contribution and meaning in our lives
And at the core is truth, our truth. The truth about what matters to us, the truth about how happy we truly are in our lives, how fulfilled
The truth about our desires , which by the way, they change through our entire life. So slowing down doesn't mean dream smaller, be less ambitious, do less things. It's practice being present. Practice taking breaks during the day. That could be 30 seconds long. That might involve two deep breaths, hands on your heart.
What's happening in here? Where am I? What am I feeling? What am I thinking? What does this mean to me?
In one of the courses that I designed a while ago, I teach the principle of aliveness. And aliveness means we're connected to our emotions. It's the opposite of being numb. It's feeling it all. It's waking up and being a part of me feels excited for the day, and a part of me feels scared about the day, and a part of me wants to go back to bed, and a part of me is bored.
It's understanding, if any of you have watched, Harry Potter movies, there is a scene in which Hermione is sharing to Ron or Harry, I can't remember, about all the feelings that she's having. And she's saying, "Well, I feel this and I feel that." And I think it was Ron, and Ron looks at her and he's like, "You're feeling all that?
How can you feel all that?" But that is the capacity we have as human beings, to feel joy and grief, to feel scared and excited, to feel bored but committed. But our lives are so busy, are so full of noise, that we have disconnected to that inner and powerful wisdom that we all have inside ourselves.
One of the things I tell my clients, and I challenge them, and I give them my opinion and my thoughts and my perspectives, but many times I tell them, "But what do you think?" Because the coach you have inside is the most important coach, but you need to learn how to hear it and to discern it, to discern what is fear and what is intuition to Differentiate between our programming and expectations people have from us of what we should be doing, of how we should be living our life, or what should matter versus what does it matter to you, truly to you?
What is the desire that you truly have in your heart That slowing down will give you access to information that you cannot find in books, that you cannot find in this podcast, that you cannot find with AI And I think that people, leaders who know how to stay connected to themselves, who know how to slow themselves in the inside, are gonna be the leaders that are gonna navigate all these changes that we're going through right now with the most success.
I think they are the ones that are gonna come up with the innovation, with the ideas, with the things that we need. I think making the effort to learn how to slow down within will become your competitive advantage.
That's all for today. Try it. Don't believe me. Test it. Slow yourself down. Listen to your intuition, and let me know what you find out. I'll see you next week. Bye.
