Limiting Beliefs Holding Entrepreneurs Back

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Okay, so today I want to talk about nine ish different limiting beliefs or mindsets or obstacles that are getting in the way of you realizing your full potential as an entrepreneur. These are the nine limiting beliefs. Actually, I don’t even know if there’s nine. I wrote down a bunch. I think it’s a little bit more than nine, but we’ll see how far we get through here. Okay. Number one thing that I see holding back entrepreneurs or limiting them is the imposter syndrome. Now, the imposter syndrome is this feeling like I don’t belong.

Like somehow I’ve snuck my way into the party, and at any given moment, people are gonna realize I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, and they’re gonna kick me out of here. The adulting police are gonna come in, and they are going to kick me out. And as you get bigger, this feeling, it doesn’t necessarily go away. And so this can give you a lot of ill feelings, of ill ease, because you’re like, wait a minute. I thought I was past this. I thought I should. I should be past this now. I don’t know why I continue to feel this way.

And we can take that as proof that we are not actually what we say we are. And that can cause all sorts of internal dissonance. But the reality of imposter syndrome is that it only occurs because you are continuing to grow beyond your current capacity. You’re living a life just beyond your comfort zone, where growth occurs. And that means you’re stepping into rooms that you don’t feel like you belong. You’re hanging out with people who are operating at a higher level. You’re taking on challenges that you’ve never done before. So you’re not actually sure if you can do it, because, you know, that’s kind of what entrepreneurship is, in a nutshell, is taking on challenges that other people don’t.

And you don’t necessarily know if it’s possible, and you’re gonna give it a shot anyway and try and find the solution. But the truth is, that feeling of imposter syndrome, it never goes away. You just get to higher and higher levels, and you realize that there’s always levels to the mountaintop. And so my reframe that’s really helped me is just to recognize that if I don’t feel like an imposter, it means I’ve stopped growing. I stopped stepping into those rooms and surrounding my people with. Surrounding myself with people who challenge me, who forced me to grow and to consider new ways of being a better version of myself. So, imposter syndrome is the price of admission. It’s not a sign that you don’t belong.

It’s the ticket. It’s the ticket that gets you in. So that’s number one. And for a lot of people, they’ll use imposter syndrome as an excuse to stop doing the things that they were doing that are getting them success. Or they’ll use it as an excuse to not even take the first step, period. In both cases, the imposter syndrome can only stop you if you let it. Because the truth is, we’re all just making it up as we go. Nobody really knows what they’re doing.

And you’ll see this, as you get around more and more successful people, is that everybody feels the same way. They all have the feeling of like, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. So the second thing that stops people are the limiting belief that holds back entrepreneurs is perfectionism. It’s this belief that it has to be just right, that you have to collect more information. You don’t quite know what you’re doing yet. But again, linking back to what we just talked about in the imposter syndrome is nobody ever really has it fully figured out. You have to be able to act in spite of that feeling of, I don’t have enough information, the ability to act and execute with the limited resources that you have available, and recognize that it’s not going to be perfect, but one is better than none. That is what separates the 1% from the 99% who just sit around collecting more and more dots, but never actually taking the time to connect them, for fear of judgment, for fear of failure, for fear of all these things.
But at the end of the day, perfectionism is just an advanced form of procrastination. That’s all it is, is you’re making an excuse for yourself to not take the steps, the necessary steps, because it’s a lot easier to collect the information. It could keep working in isolation, keep writing that book, or drawing that drawing, or painting that painting, or building that business in, in the dark, and not telling anybody about it, not putting it out there, because you’re continuing to refine it. But the truth is, if you can’t ever ship the thing, you are never going to see whether it’s a successor or not. So, perfectionism, if anything, you should aim, and this is why we talk about in the software industry, minimum viable product, is like you should aim to make the most basic product possible and ship it out there to see if people are interested in it. And I can’t remember who said it, but he said, if you’re not embarrassed by your first beta product or your first product, then you waited too long to ship it. And there’s a lot of truth to that. So the next idea that I see holding back entrepreneurs is this idea that you have no value to give, that people don’t actually care what you have to say or what you do.

And I don’t know if my, my service, my product is actually that useful. That is you getting in your own way. I promise you, if you have been a human on this planet for more than, you know, five minutes, there are some things about you and how you’ve lived your life that would bring somebody value. But you casting dispersions, judging critically your own worth to the world before you actually put it out there and see if that’s reciprocated, that’s just you getting in your own way, being your own worst enemy, being your own worst critic, rather than your biggest cheerleader. I promise you, you have value to give to the world. And the person in particular, I want you to think about who you can serve is the person you were. The person that you were before you discovered whatever the thing is that you’re bringing to the world. Be the person that you needed in your life when you were going through your deepest, darkest times.

To that person, you have value. I promise. All right, the next idea is the need for control. This is something, as entrepreneurs, you were going to need to really struggle through to figure this out because, and I really went through this to, like, the nth degree because I hated being told what to do as an employee. I also hated telling people what to do. Right? Like, I didn’t like people imposing their will on me, and I didn’t want to be the one that turned around and imposed my will on other people. And so I would always try to collaborate and get people to want to do things rather than, you know, actually delegating and taking control of the situation and directing people. It’s really easy to abdicate your responsibility as the owner of the comp, of the company and ask your team to make decisions that you are not prepared to make because you don’t feel like you have the information, you don’t want to be wrong, and so you abdicate the control of the decision.

And every time I’ve ever done that, one, I’ve done a disservice to my team, and two, it’s gone horribly you have to take control of your destiny. As an entrepreneur, you cannot outsource this. The next idea is that of patience. The truth is, time is your best friend when it comes to business, when it comes to investing, the longer you can play in this game, the more you can let time do the heavy lifting. But the corollary to this is that time is also your enemy. Time is both your best friend and it’s your enemy, which is a weird mind fuck if you’re not prepared for it. And what that means is, if you do not move quickly day to day, if you’re not sprinting towards your goals, if you’re not taking immediate action, if you aren’t executing as hard as you can every single day, then you’re probably not going to make it. The reverse of this, though, is that you have to be prepared to give it long periods of time before you see the results, the positive results, at least of your efforts.

And so the way I like to think about this is that you need to be impatient with your inputs and you need to be patient with your outputs. You need to work hard every day doing the work, but you need to be patient over the course of years and decades before you judge the quality of that work. So you need to show up every day, put out that content to make the offer, to talk to new customers. You got to do all of that stuff. But if it’s not driving sales, if you’re not growing how you want to next month, next year, then that’s still too soon to judge the quality of what you’re doing. You need to take a 510 15 year view of what you’re building over here. But you need to attack it every single day, ferociously, as though the only thing that matters is that next 24 hours, period. It’s this weird dichotomy of both sprinting in the moment, but then also jogging over the course of decades.

It’s one of the hardest balances to strike. And I don’t necessarily have good answers for you on how to strike that balance, but those are some of the limiting beliefs that I see holding back entrepreneurs. So I encourage you, I share this with you so that you can look inward and do a little bit of self reflection today and ask yourself, am I struggling with any of these? Am I letting any of these limiting beliefs stand in my way right now? Because at the end of the day, whether what you see in front of you is an obstacle or an opportunity is simply a matter of your perspective. And in this game, there are only two types of beliefs. There are your limiting beliefs, the ones that hold you back, you know, like procrastination or perfectionism or the imposter syndrome. And there are empowering beliefs. That’s it. Those either beliefs are moving you forward towards your greatness, or they’re holding you back.

I want you to audit those beliefs that you hold, that are not serving you, are not propelling you forward. And then I want you to ask yourself what would need to be true for me to not buy into this limiting belief, for me to rewrite this and turn this into something that actually helps me only hold beliefs that help you. That’s my number one piece of advice in entrepreneurship. Only believe that which moves you towards your goals. I will end it right there. Let’s land this plane. I appreciate you guys being here. Thank you so much.

We’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused. My friends.