Welcome to Visionaries 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. Hello, hello, and welcome to episode 10 of the Visionaries Pursuit podcast.
Hello, hello, and welcome to episode 11 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. I am so happy that I get to do this with you every week. Thank you so much for listening. Today, I want us to talk about expectations. Should we have high expectations? Should we be realistic? These are some of the questions I explore with my clients during coaching sessions.
Some of their questions look like this. Hey, Caro, I have this big dream. Big meeting with a potential investor. I'm so excited, but maybe I shouldn't be that excited. Maybe I should be more realistic. I have a client with whom I always laugh because he tells me, you're asking me to be delusional. And he has come to embrace being delusional, dreaming so big that it sounds ridiculous.
And yet there is this fear we all have of having high expectations, because if we don't meet those expectations, we know we're going to be disappointed. It's something I've noticed, especially with people who in the past have taken big risks, have gone all in with their dreams, have pursued something that seems so big and so impossible, and they gave it their all and they weren't successful.
And that lack of success, that failure crushed them, broke their heart. broke their hope. And now they're playing it safe. They're playing it safe because they don't want to experience that much hurt, that much pain again. So instead of getting excited, they're showing up thinking, well, there's a very small probability this is going to work, or who am I to actually get there?
this money or win this tournament or achieve this big thing that I have in mind. And although I get it, I get that we are trying to protect ourselves because disappointment doesn't feel good. Today I want to convince all of you to still dream big and instead of being afraid or trying to protect yourselves from being disappointed, to learn how to navigate disappointment in a way that it won't crush you.
The late psychologist Daniel Kahneman. did a lot of incredible research. He even won a Nobel Prize for some of his discoveries. But one of the topics he talked about is loss aversion. He discovered that as human beings, we experience the pain of loss more intensely than the pleasure of gain. It's typical of lottery winners, like the amount of happiness they feel from winning the lottery is significantly less compared to to the pain when they then lose all the money they had won.
So as humans, we are programmed to experience pain in a bigger way, in a more intense way than winning. So when we look at how we try not to have high expectations, it makes sense, right? We don't want to experience that high intensity of pain. The other reason why many of us don't have big expectations is because we're scared that the people around us, when we fail, when we don't meet those expectations.
They're going to be disappointed in us. You see, usually when we tell our family members or our friends, I'm building this business, I'm going to create this event, or I'm gonna win this sports championship. They get excited for us as well. And then when we don't make it, when we fail, when we don't get to the goal, we're scared that they're also going to be disappointed.
Or even when it takes us longer than we said. So when we tell others, By next year, we're going to break even, or in the summer, we're going to be recording the new movie. And that doesn't happen. We have to deal with everyone else's expectations. We're going to have to face each person we told about our dream and retell a new story.
And sometimes we have to retell that story multiple times, because as we've talked in many episodes before, the road of success is built upon failures. Bottom line, we don't want to have high expectations because we want to protect ourselves from feeling the pain of failure, the embarrassment of not meeting the expectations in front of other people, and in general, the disappointment we all experience when we don't achieve what we wanted to.
When we look at expectations from that lens, it makes sense to lower them, have lower expectations. That way you can protect yourself from feeling anxiety or disappointment. The problem with that is that lowering our expectations, one, doesn't guarantee we won't feel disappointed, but two, it will make the outcome of our big dream less likely to happen.
So let's say we're aiming for a very big goal with our new business. We're aiming to make 10 million in revenue in the next three years. And as we start moving towards that goal, we start seeing that it's harder than we thought that clients are not coming as fast, that the product is not at the stage that we wanted it.
So we decided, you know what? Instead of 10 millions, let's just aim for 1 million. That way we'll avoid being disappointed. We'll avoid being hurt. Well, here's the problem to make 10 million in a business. 10 You have to think in a very specific way. You have to set up your systems and your marketing and your sales process in a way to be able to achieve 10 million in a way that is different than selling 1 million.
So the moment you lower your goal to 1 million to avoid feeling disappointed, you start acting and strategizing about your business in a very different way. different way in a way that is aiming to 1 million and not to 10. So the goal to 10, you've just pushed it further away because you're not setting up your business for that bigger goal.
And same is true for any goal you have in life, right? If you're gonna go raise money for your business and you're aiming to raise 1 million and in order to not be disappointed, you aim for 300, 000, then. You start having a different strategy, a different mindset that it's going to guarantee that you do not achieve your bigger goal.
If you lower your expectations, then you don't need to upgrade your self concept and go listen to the previous episode where I talk all about the self concept. The reason why in this episode, I really want to encourage you, all of you to have high expectations is because having higher expectation makes you transform into a person that can achieve bigger goals.
There is a, a theory called expectancy theory, uh, created by Victor Vroom that says people are motivated to act if they believe that their efforts will lead to desired outcomes. So if you lower your expectations it's because you don't believe, that your desired outcome is possible, and therefore you're not going to be as motivated to act in ways to achieve that bigger goal.
Also, the research shows that higher expectations paired with clear goals and strategies to achieve them lead more to successful outcomes. One of my favorite authors and teachers is Viktor Frankl, and there's a short video about him you in TED Talks where he's explaining that we have to have higher expectations of people so they will raise to the occasion and meet those expectations.
There's something called the Pygmalion effect that is a research they did in schools and how it worked was they went into schools and they told teachers, listen we have this test that tells the potential of each kids that have potential of them being successful at school. So we're going to give it to all your students.
And then we're going to tell you which kids have high potential and which have lower potential. So they gave the kids this test and then they came back to the teachers and said, these 10 students have high potential. This other 12 are, you know, average, and this eight are low potential. And then they came a year after.
After to do the same test to the kids and what they told the teachers was random the kids They said were high potential were chosen randomly. They were not especially different from anyone else in the class But what happened a year later was that those 10 kids they had selected as high potentials were doing Way better in school than the rest.
Why? Because the teachers started believing these kids had high potential and started acting in different ways with these kids to encourage them to learn more, to try harder, to challenge themselves in bigger ways. And therefore those kids were having more success at school. It had nothing to do with their potential.
It had all to do with the belief these teachers had about the kids. And I think it's also true for ourselves. If we believe we can make 10 million and we really work on believing that probability of us achieving 10 million is way higher than if we decide before we even try that that's not possible for us.
So yes, when we have high expectations, we run the risk of feeling disappointed, of feeling crushed, of feeling sad. But without high expectations, we'll never achieve our biggest dreams. And having lower expectations does not guarantee we will not feel disappointed. In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown tells the story of this man, who she interviewed, who told her that all his life he had been realistic.
He had never allowed himself to be Too happy or too excited or too much in love because he was scared that the day he was gonna lose the person he loved, he was gonna be so sad. So he kept that realistic, you know, one day this relationship is going to end. And it happened. His wife and his daughter died in a car accident.
And what he told Brene was that All those years of being realistic did not lower his pain at all. He was devastated. He was crushed. He was so sad. And on top of that, he was even more sad because he had missed out on fully experiencing joy and love when his wife and his daughter were alive. That's my invitation.
To all of you is to not live disappointed because you're scared of feeling disappointed and instead go all in, in your dreams, dream big, pursue each desire you have with everything you have in yourself. And when the moment comes that things don't go your way, because at some point things will not go your way, it's not optional.
We will all fail. Well, let's learn how to navigate those difficult emotions. And I have some tips for this. So first, one of the things I often see in my clients who are completely devastated by a negative outcome, it's because they've given that outcome a meaning about who they are. Maybe they've said, because I wasn't able to raise the amount of capital I wanted this round means I'm not a good entrepreneur, or it means I'll never make it, or it means there's something wrong with me.
Or they've made it about others, about how embarrassed they feel that other people see them fail. When we make our failures personal, and I mean they are personal because they are failures, but when we make them mean something about who we are and the probabilities of our future success, then we are going to be way more devastated than it's needed.
When we keep the failure and see it as part of the process, when we get a rejection, when we get a no from an investor or from a client, but we still believe in ourselves, we still have high expectations of us as artists, entrepreneurs, creators, and we see that moment of rejection or that no as just a step in our way to success.
Then, not meeting the expectation is not going to feel as hard. First tip for any of you, have very high expectations about your dreams, about yourself, about the probabilities of success. And when it doesn't happen, just think about it as a step in the process and don't make it mean anything about who you are or what's possible for you.
The second recommendation I have is to dream really, really big. But do not be attached to the way you're going to get there. A lot of our disappointments are not necessarily because we didn't reach the biggest dream, but because the way we thought we were going to get there wasn't the way, or because the timing we had given ourselves.
Is we're not meeting, it's taking a little bit longer. So there's a difference between having high expectations and being attached to the way things should be. And the best way I can explain this to you is in my own process, building this business. So the way I sell my coaching program is that I have these calls with people who are interested in becoming my clients.
They're one hour long and we sit down and we explore their dreams, their obstacles, and I tell them how I can help them through coaching. When I started, every time I saw that I had the opportunity to talk with someone to become my client, I would be so attached to that person becoming my client. So I would prepare really hard.
I would show up, but I would be so nervous that they're going to say no, because I was making it mean that I would never succeed or that I wasn't. Good enough, and therefore I couldn't even offer my best coaching in that moment because I was so attached to that specific outcome. What I've learned is to not be attached to each person, but to have the expectation that I'm going to have a big impact, that I'm going to help many people, that my business is going to be very successful.
I just don't know with whom. It might be person A or it might be person Q, but it doesn't matter. Whoever is showing up, I'm going to give it my all, my best, because I believe in coaching. I believe in myself. I believe in the positive results of this process, but I'm not going to be attached that it has to be John.
Or Anna, it will be whoever is meant to be for me. And one of the things that helped me think this way is thinking about Coca Cola. Coca Cola, we can all agree that has been one of the most successful businesses in the last century. I was looking in their website and they. sell about 1. 9 billion servings of Coca Cola each year.
That is a lot! And there's about 7 billion people in this planet, which tells us that the majority of people in the planet today don't buy Coca Cola. So Coca Cola gets a lot more nose than yeses, and they're still very successful. And that's true for any of us. We might get a lot of no's in our way to a yes, but one yes will take us way further than we think.
So we don't have to always win. We don't need We don't need every investor to invest in us. We don't need every client or potential client that crosses our path to buy from us. We need to continue believing in our dream, in ourselves, in our project. Take those notes in stride and keep moving forward and be very careful with lowering our expectations because if we aim lower, we're going to achieve lower.
So here's the summary. Should you have high expectations? Absolutely yes. Should you be attached to the way you're going to meet those expectations? No. Should you always prepare and give it your all to every potential opportunity, believing as if that opportunity was going to work out? Yes. Yes, should you be attached that if they say no, it means anything about yourself or your potential success?
No. I invite you to dream big, to have high expectations and learn to navigate disappointment and manage your brain when things don't go your way. I'll see you next time.
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 slash consult that is C A R O Z U L E T A dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me.
See you there.
