3 Psychological Tricks to stop beating yourself up as a business owner
Summary
- I've realized that mistakes and failures are simply prerequisites for success; they're experiences from which we learn the most vital lessons. For instance, notable CEOs like Howard Schultz from Starbucks and Steve Jobs from Apple were both removed from their positions and later brought back, highlighting the normality of setbacks at any level.
- I had a belief that being hard on myself was necessary for drive and success, but this isn't true. It's about reframing your perspective and understanding the energy that fuels your success.
- In 2019, I delegated salary and pay decisions too early without a reliable system in place. This led to unintended salary increases and reminded me of the importance of properly checking work before passing off responsibilities.
- I've learned to convert the negative energy from what I perceive as mistakes into something productive. Asking myself, "How can I use this to be more productive?" helps me avoid the unproductivity of self-deprecation.
- When reflecting on experiences, I concentrate on finding a "helpful lesson". Humans tend to make negative associations that can be obstructive. Instead, I ask myself, "What helpful lesson can I learn from this?" to focus on constructive outcomes.
- I now expect myself to make mistakes. Anticipating them avoids disappointment. As in business, even excellent plans usually face hitches, and it is normal to falter 20% of the time, if not more. The key is to react positively to these experiences.
- To mitigate being hard on myself, I shift the negative energy into something productive, seek lessons that are helpful for moving forward, and expect and accept mistakes as a normal aspect of growth and leadership. I encourage others to see these as experiences rather than failures or mistakes.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest thinking about mistakes as lessons, not as failures. Remember, even big CEOs mess up sometimes, like Howard Schultz and Steve Jobs. That means it's okay if you make mistakes too. Just try to learn from them and move on.
A good way of doing this is to ask yourself what you can learn when things go wrong, instead of being hard on yourself. For example, if you give someone a job to do, and they make a mistake, think about how you can help them do better next time. Maybe you need to train them more or explain better.
If you're feeling really upset about a mistake, turn that energy into something good. Instead of getting mad at yourself, use that energy to make things better. Like, if you realize you gave someone a task too soon, think about a system to check their work before it causes problems.
Finally, plan to mess up sometimes. Don't expect everything to go perfectly. Even the best plans have some problems. If you think you'll do everything right, you might get really disappointed when something goes wrong. But if you know mistakes will happen, you can handle them better.
So, remember:
- See mistakes as a chance to learn.
- Turn upset feelings into good energy to do better.
- Plan that sometimes things won't go as you expect, and that's okay.
Quotes by Leila Hormozi
"Mistakes and failures are honestly just the prerequisite for success"
– Leila Hormozi
"We have to expect ourselves to make mistakes"
– Leila Hormozi
"I am still going to experience those mistakes and failures, it's just a matter of how I deal with them"
– Leila Hormozi
"Beating yourself up isn't productive"
– Leila Hormozi
"What helpful lesson can I learn from this experience?"
– Leila Hormozi
Full Transcript
what is up today what i want to talk about is how i stopped beating myself up despite my mistakes and failures while building my business and this came from a question that somebody asked in i think it was like an instagram poll and they basically said um you know how do you keep moving forward without beating yourself up when you've made so many mistakes um and this wasn't directed towards me though i've made countless mistakes um but it was really directed about themselves and this is a question that i've gotten time and time again and i kind of had to put more thought towards it because i could regurgitate with some other youtube person or podcast i told you but it wouldn't be the truth and so i really had to dissect like my mental framework for how i stopped doing this to myself and i'll start with the premise which is i think that anyone who is driven towards success and who is ambitious um a lot of the times they the other side of that ambition or the other side of that success is that that person tends to be very hard on themselves and so a lot of the times the beliefs that come with that are beliefs like well i don't know if i could be successful if i didn't beat myself up if i wasn't so hard on myself etc etc um and i don't believe this to be true it was a belief that i held for a very long time which was if i'm not hard on myself and i'm not extremely judgmental and critical of myself then i'm not going to have this drive to succeed um but what it actually is is that it's um one it's a reframing okay and then two it's an understanding of the energy source that fuels your success and so what i want to talk about today is the reframing and then i'll talk next time more about the energy source and where you get get that momentum for success from um the first piece of it is that i i came to the realization that mistakes and failures are honestly just the prerequisite for success and so honestly i remember the first time i had that thought and it was after reading the book pour your heart into it by howard schultz and he talked about his success and he talked about um when he stepped out of starbucks and how starbucks flopped and how he had to come back into starbucks and the irony of it was that they they basically fired him the first time um because he wasn't doing good for the company because they didn't think that he was the right person to grow it to where it needed to grow to right and i remember thinking myself when i read that i was like i still get to think about it um i was like man even at that level you can still [ __ ] up that badly right like where your whole board of directors is like get out you're not the right person right and then you know ironically like seven or nine years later they brought him back in but i remember thinking myself like wow if the biggest companies in the world and the most noteworthy ceos in the world still experience mistakes and failures then i am not immune like i am still going to experience those mistakes and failures it's just a matter of how i deal with them and what my expectations are about them another good example of that is just um you know steve jobs and how they kind of kicked him out and then brought him back in as well right and how apple didn't grow for years i think that we have to take those things into consideration because for some reason it's easy for us to stomach it when we see someone else and we hear about someone else's mistakes and failures um but we're not able to do it once ourselves and it's very interesting to me because those people are also known for being insanely successful yet their failures were huge you know they failed for years and years on end and so i look at it like the more success you want typically the more mistakes and failure is required because that's typically how people learn now i would like to think that we can learn without the mistakes and failure but i think that our most powerful learnings do come from the mistakes and failures and for myself i think that i have a lot of different things that i could beat myself up for right and in the past i really think that i did that all the time and it was um a lot of people say like well do you think that that would have changed how the business went if you hadn't beat yourself up so much if you hadn't been so hard yourself and i'm like no absolutely not because i think it's really unproductive so i'll give you an example which was in 2019 i decided that i was going to delegate you know basically salary and pay and so i said this is you know i think we've got it down i'm going to delegate it it doesn't need to get passed through me anymore and i didn't have the best system in place like i thought i did but i did not um and looking back on it now i think that with a few small tweaks it could have been um prevented but instead you know i passed it off and i kind of just didn't look at it right and that's you know if you look at my video on delegation that's one of the pieces i should have been checking it and i passed it off and then one day um one of my teammates uh slaps me and she's like layla i just got a seven thousand dollar raise and i was like what because she was my direct report and i'm like what are you talking about seven thousand dollar raising you raised like i'm i'm sorry i just gave you a raise a few months ago like i'm kind of confused what do you mean and she's like oh well you know there was a decision that you know because of where i lived or something like that um it was you know looking at um medium incomes and such where people live we're gonna you know just adjust everyone's income based on where they live and based on how that may have changed in the last year and i was like what i'm like we're a virtual company what are you talking about i didn't approve this so i went in i'm all stompy and i'm like what's happened and within an instant i was like this is completely my fault and they had um you know the people that were deciding this had decided to basically give you know i want to say about 12 different people in the company raises without asking me without telling their managers i mean it was just a complete mess and those people were confused they didn't understand at the same time they're like i'm not going to say no it's money um and that was a not fun mess to clean up and i beat myself up for a long time over that i remember sitting on a couch with alex and i was telling him he was just like why are you i was telling him i just feel like i'm gonna funk i feel like it's something blah blah he was like why do you keep beating yourself up over this he's like i've made tons of mistakes in the business and i was like right but this was mine like i am so responsible for this i passed it off too soon i didn't quality check it like what the hell and he was like well you know worrying about him being yourself up isn't gonna do anything and i was like [ __ ] he's so right um and i you know that's something that i like to observe in other people which is you know i think that until that point until i really experienced that where i had like a couple weeks where i was in a funk and i wasn't showing up well for my team i used to think it was productive to beat myself up and be hard on myself i'm like well that's why i'm a high performer right that's why i'm so successful it's like no that's [ __ ] but it's a good story to tell yourself um and so the three conclusions i kind of came to out of that because that was probably the depth of my uh self deprecation was after that mistake because i just felt like it was public everyone saw um there was not an easy way to correct it and it created long-term you know issues down the road because people were actually being overpaid for things that they were doing and so i had to deal with it for a really long time and the repercussions of it and so it kept reminding me and reminding me of that mistake and so from that i kind of wrote down the things that i learned and i wanted to use it as an opportunity to then say next time something like this happens i'm not going to beat myself up i'm instead going to be productive okay and so that was the first shift that i kind of came up with which is um i realized that when something happens which you may label as a mistake or a failure right it's an experience when an experience happens um we tend to have a lot of if we think it didn't go our way negative energy around it and beating yourself up is really a way of um i think i want to say like getting out that negative energy it's a way of um utilizing the negative energy and so what i what i kind of thought to myself was well the energy is there and whether i use it to beat myself up or learn from it and do something more productive with my time is up to me right the energy is still there so it's my responsibility to take that negative energy and turn it into positive energy and so now when i make a mistake i'm immediately i'm like you don't get to beat yourself up today no we're not going to indulge in that instead we're going to say you know how can i use this to be more productive how can i take this energy and make it into something that is going to push me forward and make me excited to wake up tomorrow right because beating yourself up isn't going to like there's no magical ideas that are going to come from that you're not going to do something amazing for people on your team after you're beating yourself up for weeks and weeks on end right it's usually that um it almost feels good for you to be mean to yourself and so you just kind of indulge in that and for some reason you think it's productive right so that was the first thing is learning how to switch the energy the second one is a question i ask myself which is what helpful lesson can i learn from this experience and it's really key to say helpful lesson because a lot of the times what we do is we make conclusions from mistakes that are not useful this is because humans like to make associations about things right and so we like to say well this was here and this was here and then the mistake happened so it must be these two things when in reality um a lot of the times it's more nuanced than that it's like something tiny in the details it's not any of the things you're even looking at and so a lot of the times what happens instead is that we we tend to correlate something that didn't even cause the mistake so we might say something like now i just wanted i don't trust anybody you know now i just know that i just can't delegate this again now i just know that nobody can really do it like me like really nobody ever can and we come up with all these like grandiose ideas that are terrible and really suffocating um that prevent us from ever moving forward or learning from that mistake again when in reality it might just be that you didn't do the interview screening process as thoroughly as you could have um you delegated something too soon and it was actually on you it's not on them it's not that somebody else can't do the job right or it could be that you didn't train someone well to do the job and so um that was the second thing that i realized is i need to ask myself what helpful lesson can i learn because humans have the tendency to air towards the negative and i want to train myself to go towards the positive and say what can i positively take away from this experience right and the third thing which is i now expect myself to make mistakes building a business plan a personal plan um a path to a goal that does not anticipate and expect mistakes is setting yourself up for disappointment right and that's because we tend to for some reason understand that other people can make mistakes right it's acceptable we see that we see these iconic figures who make mistakes and yet for some reason we think that we are beyond that and that we should know better right and we said well i should have known better i should have done this differently like i can't believe this happened all these unproductive thoughts when in reality if you understand that most of the time even if you make a fantastic plan and you really try and you're really trying your best to be a great ceo or leader um you're going to mess up like 20 of the time right i would say minimum 20 times sometimes i feel like i'm messing up 50 of the time but i'd say minimum 20 and so that's the third piece is you have to expect yourself to make mistakes just as i would never expect that i could bring someone new into my team and then make zero mistakes right i wouldn't expect myself to make zero mistakes okay so instead take that expectation and put it on how you react to the mistake and say i will instead of not expecting myself to make mistakes i will expect myself to try and react more positively every time i do and so that is how i have learned to uh mitigate i've not eliminated beating myself up but i've definitely mitigated it and lessened it um by doing those three things by understanding that there's energy under that act of beating yourself up and i can take that energy and continue to indulge in beating myself up or i can take it and put it into something productive the second one is asking for the right questions right which is understanding is you know what can i get from this lesson that is helpful for me to move forward rather than looking at things that don't actually add up and kind of making these grandiose assumptions and then lastly is just expecting mistakes remembering that you're human and just because you now have the title ceo and you own a business doesn't mean you are not going to make six you're still the same human you were before and no matter how hard you try and how hard you study you're going to make mistakes and i would beg you to also not say the word mistake or failure instead say experience and so if this video is useful go ahead hit subscribe and hopefully i will see you on the 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