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. Welcome back. And this is episode 18. And we're continuing talking about the theme of goal setting and visioning.
Welcome back. This is episode 24 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. I want to start with a story of one of my clients, and although it's her story, I want to share it because I think it's a universal story and that we can all relate. My client is the CEO of a.
Very successful company. She's done great. She's an amazing leader. Her employees and her clients love her. But lately she was telling me that she's just feeling exhausted, that she has low energy, that she's dreading every day, that she's just very, very tired. So usually when my clients tell me that they're feeling exhausted or burnout, We look in two places.
The first place is where we all look, right? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? Are you hydrating your body? Is there something going on with your hormones that might be draining your energy? And the other place we look, which is as important, is their brain. What are the thoughts they've been having?
So I asked my client, lately, what are some of the thoughts that keep running through your head? And she was like, you know what, I have two clients that are very important to my business and I'm really scared we're going to lose them. And she had some reasons that were out of her control as why these clients might exit.
So then I said, okay, so you're worried about that. So what's happening? She's like, well, I'm waking in the middle of the night thinking about this. I can sleep well. My sleep is completely disturbed and I asked her, so what happens next? She told me I wake up tired and then I don't have enough energy. So I feel that I'm not doing enough for my business.
She had a very high bar of all the things she could accomplish in a day. And now she wasn't accomplishing them. So she kept telling herself, I'm not doing enough. I'm not doing enough. And that I'm not doing enough created even more stress and more worry and more guilt and started becoming this critical voice in her head that not only told her she's not doing enough, but that she's not good enough, that she wasn't a good enough CEO, that she should be able to have high energy at all times and perform at the same level she had been performing for the last one or two years.
So today, I want us to talk about a topic that we rarely talk about in business and it's our emotions. Even though all humans feel emotions. We have created a culture that emotions shouldn't be brought to work, that you should leave them at home, that leaders shouldn't be emotional, that if you cry at work, that's a really bad thing, which I really think what we're saying is you can be angry and happy at work, all the other emotions, you can't bring them here.
But the truth is that All of us have a huge emotional range. In her book, Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown classifies 87 emotions. Stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, disappointment, regret, sadness, curiosity, calm, contentment, gratitude are just some of them. Variety of emotions we have as human beings is It's broad and it's big, but most of us can't even name them.
Some of the things I hear from my clients are, I don't do emotions. Oh no, if I start crying, I will never stop. I don't want to show weakness at work. And sometimes I laugh because how can you be bad at emotions if you're a human being and emotions are just part of who we are. But what if everything you want as a leader or as a visionary is being held back by an emotion?
What if the only reason you still don't have what you desire the most is because there are emotions you're not willing to feel or you don't know how to navigate them? This question may sound out there. So what I'm gonna do in this episode is show you in very Practical ways, why as a visionary and as a leader, learning to manage your emotions, to feel them is imperative for your own success, your business success, the success of your employees.
I'm going back to my client story. I started asking her what was the impact of her being so tired and exhausted and we kept talking and one of the things she was doing was taking on clients that were not her ideal clients. Why? Because her brain was focused on scarcity. If I lose this client I have, I need more clients and therefore she was allowing clients into her business that weren't what she was dreaming of, the best clients she knew she could serve.
Because the first impact of not learning to manage our emotions is poor decision making. Our emotions are created in our amygdala, which you can imagine like something the size of an almond in the center of your brain. That's where our emotional brain lives. But the decision making part of our brain is our prefrontal cortex, which is behind our forehead.
And when our nervous system gets deregulated, the link between our amygdala and our prefrontal cortex breaks. So, then you're not making decisions from your prefrontal cortex, you're making decisions from your emotions. And all of us know that when we make emotional decisions, they're not the best decisions.
And I know it may sound contradictory because I'm telling you, you have to learn to manage your emotions. You need to allow them and feel them. Yes. But because when you allow them and feel them. And you know how to navigate them. You know when you're in an emotional state that you're just reacting to whatever has happened and when you get to a place where you're more calm and serene and you can access your prefrontal cortex to make better decisions.
This also means that you can stay calmer in chaotic moments, in moments where people are getting scared. And I've asked my clients, who is the best leader you've worked for? And why? What makes that person an amazing leader? And many of their answers can be summed up. In this, oh, that leader has a way of de escalating conflict, that leader has a way of helping me stay calm, and the team calm so we can make better decisions.
And also, when we're able to calm down our nervous system, we have more access to creativity, to be creative in the way we're making decisions and finding solutions for the problems that we're facing. So, number one reason why we as leaders must learn to manage our emotions is so we can have access to better decision making.
The second reason, and it's related to the reason my clients tell me why they consider some people the best leaders, is because when we can remain calm, when we know that we are triggered and know that it's not the best moment to interact with others, And people can see us in that stage. We inspire confidence and trust.
The way a leader is feeling is triggered to all the employees or the people who are working with you. So if a leader is feeling anxious, reactive, volatile, It spreads, and then your team starts feeling like that, and then nobody's making good decisions. But when a leader is like, yes, we have this problem, but we're all gonna stay calm, then everyone can stay calm.
I think we all know this when we are on an airplane, and turbulence starts, the first people I look at are the flight attendants. Because in a way, they are the leaders that I can see in the flight. And if I see them calm, I'm like, okay, things seem to be under control. I don't think I would ever want to see them panicking because that would make me super scared.
So, the second reason why we must learn to manage our emotions is so we can have a more positive influence on the people we lead. The third reason is that as visionaries, There are going to be a lot of moments where we're going to face high stress situations. When people are going to criticize us, they're going to reject us, and we are going to fail.
Moments where we're going to have to have hard conversations that we want to run away from. And learning to manage our emotions gives us more resilience. If we don't know how to process rejection or criticism. That can be the end of our career. That can be the end of our dream. Learning to navigate these emotions let us stand up after we have fallen down and fallen down in front of a lot of people and even feeling that we were ridiculous and that people are laughing at us.
Managing our emotions allows us to stand up and stand up stronger so we can keep moving towards our vision. So the third reason to manage our emotions is to have stronger resilience. The fourth reason has to do a lot with what I was telling you the story about my client and it's your energy management.
A lot of us think that burnout is because we've worked a lot. That's what I hear often. I'm burnout because I've been working a lot, but when I dig deeper, emotional exhaustion is the cause for most of the burnouts I hear. It's when you are walking around criticizing yourself, criticizing everything you do, fighting with others, resenting others, blaming others, and instead of managing your internal system, that that's how your energy is being drained.
When we learn to manage our emotions, we learn how to stay motivated, inspired, creative. One of the things I teach my clients is the idea of high value cycles and low value cycles. In high value cycles is when we are creating the best for our business or for our project, that we're inspired, we're being so productive and effective and innovative.
And a low value cycle is when we're still producing value, of course, but it's less, and the main reason why is because we're allowing our emotions to drain the energy that we have every day. So the fourth reason to learn to manage your emotions is to be able to avoid burnout and know how to stay in those high value cycles.
And the last reason, and I hope I'm convincing you that really this is a very important topic for you to think about is your ability to go out there and sell your product, your vision, your company, your service. When we sell, when we ask for money, when we put ourselves out there by marketing or becoming visible in some way, We are going to face rejection and failure, and sometimes people are going to disagree with what we have to say.
And if we don't know how to manage our emotions in those moments, if we allow the fear of rejection or failure to take over us, we won't be able to sell and get the money we need to grow our businesses. When we start connecting, and by the way, this is so human, it happens to all of us, our self worth to the success of our business, that creates so many negative emotions in us that we start playing small and we start avoiding opportunities that we know are fundamental for our business because we're feeling fear and we don't know how to navigate that fear.
So the fifth reason To learn to manage your emotions is so you can be better at mastering your money, your sales, and being able to do marketing and put yourself out there. And the last reason I want to offer to you all is because not learning how to manage your emotions will at some point negatively affect the relationships you have.
In your personal life and in your work life, with your teams and with your people. When a leader doesn't know how to manage their negative emotions, they can't create psychological safety. And we know that psychological safety is fundamental for creativity, teamwork, productivity, all the things we want to have inside our business.
When you know to stay calm when you're triggered, when you know how to have a difficult conversation with someone and not let your emotions overtake you and become reactive, it's gonna create so many positive byproducts, not only now, But in the future of your company and also it will create good self esteem within you because you know you're an integrity with what you believe and what you think and not just pretending that things are going well when this negative feelings are fostering through the team and creating in a culture and environment that you don't want.
I hope by now, by looking at these six very practical reasons why managing our emotions is so important, has convinced you to do the hard work of growing your emotional intelligence. Now what I want to do is give you some ideas on how you can start doing this. The first idea is for you to. To increase your emotional vocabulary in Brenna Brown's book, Atlas of the heart.
She says that when we don't have the words to name our emotions, it is as if we were going to the doctor with a pain in our shoulder without being able to say pain or shoulder or point at it. It would be so frustrating. We couldn't explain the experience we're having. And they have proven in research that when we're able to name the emotion, When we're able to say, you know what, I'm overwhelmed, instead of I'm scared, or I'm worried, or I'm stressed, or I'm calm, being able to name Appropriately, what we're feeling engages our prefrontal cortex so we can have better access to managing our emotion instead of our emotion managing us.
So if after listening to this episode, you think to yourself, I really want to improve my emotional intelligence, I recommend you buy that book Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown and start reading and learning about all the emotions we experience as humans. The second tool I want to offer you. is breathing.
I know it sounds so simple, but it is one of the most powerful ways to regulate our nervous system. And there's two types of breathing that have been proven most effective. The first one, it's called box breathing. And you can think about a box, right? Like a square. And you inhale for four seconds. You hold for four seconds, you exhale for four seconds, and you hold for four seconds.
And you imagine like as you're inhaling and holding and exhaling and holding that you are drawing a square. That is one of the best ways to breathe when you're having high emotions. And the other one is called extended exhale. And it's when you breathe in for four seconds, but you exhale for eight seconds.
That activates your parasympathetic system, which is the system that gives you that inner calm and inner peace. And the third tool I'm going to give you is to go out and be in nature. You can walk on grass without shoes when you are touching the earth with your body. Or you can sit down and receive sunlight.
Or you can look at the birds. Whatever way you can connect to nature, nature has a way of calming our nervous system. And here I want to say something that's very important. Because we are human beings, we don't decide necessarily when am I going to feel reactive or when something is going to trigger me, it just happens.
We are in a board meeting, someone says something and we feel the rush of emotions coming to our body. Or we receive an email from a client and all of a sudden we feel this fear, intense fear. When you're a leader, it doesn't mean you're not going to feel. the opposite. You are going to feel even more, but you will know when you're having that feeling and you're gonna buy yourself enough space and time to regulate your nervous system and then make decisions.
And that might mean that you're in the middle of a meeting and you say, let's hit pause. I need to think about this more. That might mean that when you're in a meeting, And you are feeling triggered or you're noticing that in the team there's high emotions, you will have the ability to say, let's hit pause, let's think about this even more, and let's reconvene tomorrow at 3 p.
m. Your ability to notice your emotions, name them inside of you, buy yourself time before you react is what leadership is all about. Bottom line, learning to manage your emotions, expanding your emotional vocabulary, knowing how to regulate your nervous system, learning how to buy time before you make a decision out of an emotion.
It's not just a soft skill, it's a leadership skill. The most successful influential leaders master their inner state so they can influence their external world. I hope you found this valuable and 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!
