88. How Many Times Are You Willing to Try?

Carolina Zuleta: Welcome to Visionary's Pursuit, a podcast where

Carolina Zuleta: we explore what it takes to turn

Carolina Zuleta: your bold and inspiring ideas into reality.

Carolina Zuleta: I'm Carolina Suleta.

Carolina Zuleta: I'm a life and a business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here. Hi.

Carolina Zuleta: Welcome back. This is episode 88 of the Visionary's Pursuit podcast. Some weeks ago, I was, um, reading a newsletter that is one of my favorite newsletters to read, which is from Amy Porterfield. Amy is someone that I've been following for, I think, 10 years, maybe more, and I have purchased some of her courses. She began her business by teaching people how to use Facebook and Instagram for business purposes, for marketing purposes. And then she started teaching how to create digital courses online, and I also did that course with her. So, anyway, I was reading her newsletter, and she said something that struck me. She said she's been in business for 16 years, and she has created sales over $130 million in selling digital products online. But the thing that struck me the most is that in these 16 years, she's done 500 webinars to sell those products. 500 webinars. That's a lot of webinars. For someone who also uses webinars or used webinars in the past to sell my services, I know just one webinar takes so much work. So I was just doing the math. And that means she's been doing a webinar, uh, around every three weeks for 16 years straight. Therefore, it makes sense that she has sold over a hundred million dollars of her products. And listening to this, I started reflecting on my own journey, on how, you know, I remember when I did my first webinar, someone that I cared deeply about gave me really tough feedback about the webinar, and. And I fell into such shame and a spiral of negative emotions. And then I remember another time, I think I've shared that story in this podcast that I did a webinar, and over 15,000 people enrolled, and nobody purchased my services except my mom, which is a very cute story, but it also took me into such a low place of, yeah, I think it was shame and failure that it also took me months or even a year to get up and do another webinar. And in between, you know, I've had webinars that have been successful and lots of webinars that have failed, but never 500 webinars. So I connected that to something that I've heard Tony Robbins talk a lot about, and I've heard him say this so often, and I feel like, it's clicking for me in a different way. Tony talks about taking massive, determined action. He says that you just have to continue doing things and trying things. And I love that he says determined because it's not just doing things, but it's doing things that you think are going to take you to the outcome you want, and measuring results and evaluating how those things are working, but doing it massively. And I think that to be able to do something massively right, like 500 webinars, one of the abilities we need to develop is that resiliency. Because I bet 500 webinars Amy Porterfield did not all of them were successful. I bet many of them, probably hundreds of them, were failures. But she had to go through those failures in order to get the success she has right now. So reading this about Amy Porterfield, listening to Tony Robbins, massive action, and even connecting it to something, I heard Kris Jenner, the mom of the Kardashians, say in an interview or something that she said at the beginning, they were just throwing spaghetti at the wall. They were trying all different things. And for me, the reflection and like most of you that are listening to this podcast, I am on my own journey of growing this business, of figuring it out. I very big ambition and a long way to go to get to my goals. And I've also shared in this podcast, nobody knows what's going to work. And it really hit me. I need to do more things. I need to take more massive action. And that's what inspired this episode for today. So usually how my brain works is I'll hear something, I'll read something, it will resonate with me, and then I'll connect it to someone else who taught me something or do a little bit of research, or I'll go deeper in the subject, really trying to make meaning and thinking about how can I apply it. Doing this. It also took me to something I learned from one of my mentors, one of the places I got certified as a coach. And her name is Bru Castillo. And Bru Castillo also talks about massive action. And the way she defines massive action is to take action until you get the result you want. But she also talks about it, uh, in terms of the contrast to passive action. But as entrepreneurs, we can feel very busy. We can feel like we're doing a lot of things, but the things we're doing are not creating the results that we want. We're doing things that feel low risk, that feel fun and exciting, but actually don't bring clients in, which really is what we Want, at the end of the day in a business to bring clients in. And those things are, you know, building a website, getting another certification, reading another book, feeling like you have to learn more or that everything needs to look very pretty and nice and great in order for you to sell. Even creating beautiful content for social media without evaluating it, if it's converting. And I think it's an important distinction to bring it here because I made that mistake. I know for sure. For many years I thought I was taking massive action, but really what I was doing is, you know, reading and learning and planning and researching and downloading a free guide from this person and taking a course with the other person and, you know, tweaking my website and getting a new brand and a new logo and all those things were so fun. But as I've shared, I stopped doing those things in the last two or three years and we've had more sales than ever in the previous six or seven without, you know, right now, my website is okay, but it's not the website that represents the brand I have in my brain, which we're working on getting there. But now I understand that that's not what's going to grow the business. Massive action is very related to taking risks. And risk can be financial risk, right? It might be, you know, on Facebook ads or paying to be part of a conference and speak to make your offers. But it mostly means that you're taking emotional risk, you're exposing yourself emotionally. So it's things such as ask for the sale, making a cold call, hosting a webinar, inviting people to join it, and maybe nobody joins it, or maybe people join it and you sell on the webinar and nobody buys. It's any place where you're finding those clients that are going to help you grow your business. Passive action feels safe, right? Uh, there's not that much risk because working on the website, so fun. But what is the risk or creating the website you want? It's really when you're being vulnerable, when you're opening yourself up for the possibility of rejection or failure, that it's when that massive action is going to bring you a result that then you can evaluate. This is the other thing I wanted to bring here. It's not doing a lot of things. It is doing a lot more than probably many of us do if we want to be more successful. But it's also being able to stop and evaluate. Are those actions that I'm taking taking me towards the reward? How can I measure them? What is my hypothesis? Since I'M a coach. I've met so many coaches throughout the years, and currently I have two coaches who are also my friends that we do peer coaching. So we meet once a week and I coach them for half an hour and they coach me for half an hour. And one of those friends mentioned to me some weeks ago, she's like, I've been noticing a pattern in our coaching sessions hidden in the questions you bring for coaching or the topics you bring from coaching. Beneath that, I sense that you have still a thought or a belief that there is a right answer to grow your business, that there is someone that has a perfect formula. And I laughed because I know this has been an old belief that I've worked through. And I am, um, now 100% convinced that nobody in the world knows how to grow my business, that the only way I'll know how to grow my business is by trying a bunch of different things. And in the future, I can come back and tell you, here's how I grew it. 10x in 2020. I laughed and I was like, wow, those old beliefs sometimes do show up. And I think it has to do with the exposure, the emotional exposure, the risk. All of us, when we're entrepreneurs, we're investing money and there's a risk of losing it. We're investing our time and our energy. And I think that that part of us that is like, oh, how do I avoid failure? Might come in and try to say, what is the right way to do it, instead of really the attitude the biggest entrepreneurs have. That is, I have an idea. I'm going to go out, I'm going to test it. I'm going to put all my heart, effort, money into it. I'm going to go all in and then evaluate. If didn't work, I'm going to pivot and I'm going to try it again. I'm going to pivot and I'm trying again. Right. What massive action means. In fact, for this episode, I was looking at different entrepreneurs as examples of, you know, big business owners, businesses that have grown a lot of how much massive action they took before they were successful. And a couple of the stories that I loved was James Dyson, you know, Dyson vacuum cleaners and all that, he wanted to create a bagless vacuum, and it took him 5,127 prototypes to do it. But it wasn't like he was just doing it, oh, I have another idea. I'm going to do a different type of vacuum cleaner. He stayed focused. He was able to learn from each Prototype to make it better and better and better. So again, massive action is not just this one dramatic leap that you're like, okay, this is the thing that I'm going to do and it's going to work. It's thousands of small, m unglamorous attempts that we do and we fail. And nobody saw that post. Nobody clicked on here, nobody listened to this podcast episode. Oh, we had three people enroll. We had four people enroll. It's those little steps, but doing them one after another after another that will get you there. Um, and the other example that I also love is the story of Melanie Perkins. She's one of the co founders of Canva it said. I mean, I haven't heard this from her, but, uh, what I was reading is that she went to over 100 investors to raise money for her project. All of them rejected it. I want you to really imagine that, what it means to do a hundred pitches to investors, getting all no's. One of my clients has been going through that. She's been pitching her business and pitching her business and she has some new seed funding and she's doing her first series A and the amount of rejection and how tired she is and the emotional roller coaster, but she's keeping at it because I think that resilience, that continuous trying one thing after another is what makes us successful. And I think Melanie Perkins is an amazing example. I can't imagine going through a hundred pitches, getting all no's, but still continuing to believe in your vision, to continue to believe in your project. That relationship with rejection, that resiliency after every time we fail is one of the key things to be successful. And that's why in my group program, the Visionary Mindset Program, I teach so much about emotional mastery. Because I've said, and, uh, you've heard me said in this podcast, there's only two things that really stop us from success. Our thoughts are our emotions. And if, like me, because my, my journey was. Has not been one day and then the next day I was successful, I've gone through a lot of failure and I've gone through a lot of passive failure because I didn't know how to navigate this rejection, this fear of being ridiculed or embarrassed. Those things were so hard for me that have, they have slowed me down so much. And that's why, you know, we don't talk a lot about emotions in, in entrepreneurship. But that's why I think it's so, so key. Okay, the other thing I wanted to share is I've also talked about him in this podcast, because I think it's a great read for all of us that we are entrepreneurs. It's this book called the War of Arts, written by Steven Pressfield, in which he makes a distinction between amateurs, um, and professionals. And he's talking to creatives, but I think as entrepreneurs, we are creatives. And he's saying, you know, amateurs write, for example, if the writer, when they're inspired, when it feels good, when the sun is out, when they have an idea they think is going to be exceptional. Well, professional writers write every single day, no matter how they're feeling, no matter how the weather is, no matter if they think they're good ideas or not good ideas. In fact, this morning I was listening to an interview with Billie Eilish, the singer, and she was saying how much she hates writing music. And she said it was because to write music, she had to go through so much failure, so many bad songs or bad lyrics. And especially when she said that when she's writing with the pressure that people have to like it, that it's really, really hard that she still writes. She writes every day. She also said that they had asked her, hey, are you creating a new album because you want to or because the contract you have with your label is making you? And she said she had never even considered that because this is what she does, she writes, so then she can have the privilege and the joy of singing her own songs. So I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, how much action are you taking? How many different things are you trying? How are you protecting yourself from taking more risk because you're scared of the failure, you're scared of being tired, or you're scared of, you know, falling short or being embarrassed by others or that people won't like it. I want you to take out an inventory of the actions you're taking. Which of those are passive actions, which ones are, uh, massive actions, which ones are taking you to the results that you want, which of those actions you're not taking because they feel risky, because you're unsure they're going to work. And to finish, I want to invite you to take a challenge that I am taking on right now, and it's to execute on any idea that comes to my mind, to try as many things as I'm inspired to do and see what happens. And this, I know, can contradict with time management that I've said before of, uh, you know, getting rid of 80% of the things you do and staying focused on your 20% most important things. But I think that 20% is the different strategies you try in order to get clients and grow your business. I think it's important for you to not get overwhelmed. And I am executing on the ideas I have, but we're putting them in a calendar together and saying, okay, we're doing this one here. Once we finish with this one, we're doing the next one. It doesn't mean that massive action is, you need to do everything right now, this weekend, this week, and just get so overwhelmed and tired that then you don't end up doing anything. It's that you are consistently doing those unglamorous, um, small steps that you believe might take you to the result that you want. And also I'm thinking about some of my clients who have bigger businesses. And maybe right now it's not necessarily about, you know, getting more clients because sales are going well, but it's also taking massive action in interviewing people and organizing systems so they can have everything set up for their next stage of growth. I'm recording this podcast for me, but I hope it's also for all of you. My intention is that for all of you, it sparks some thought and some wake up call and being like, if I want to grow my business to the next level, if I want to 10x my business, what is the massive action I'm going to take? And if I'm experiencing all this resistance, fear of rejection and all that, how am I going to navigate that? And if any of you, you hear this, you get excited, but you either get overwhelmed or you're scared, or you're confused, or you need more clarity, make sure you book a consult with me. We'll spend an entire hour looking at where your business is. What types of massive action can you take, how can you organize yourself? And I can then tell you how I can continue supporting you while you take all this massive action. Building resilience to navigate all the tough emotions and the emotional exposure that exists when we're growing our business. I am super inspired by these insights I've had. I am excited and the ideas are flowing of different things. I want to do different free online classes, I want to give workshops, webinars, online challenges, all kinds of things. So also stay tuned because all of it that I want to create, my number one thing, yes, is to grow the business, but also is to add a lot of value to all of you. So stay tuned and I'll see you next time. Bye.

Carolina Zuleta: 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 carasuleta.com consult that is C-A R-O-Z-U-L-E-T A.com consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me. See you there.