I told myself I was wealthy until it came true.

Summary

• The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape our beliefs and character, leading to changes in behavior within business and personal life.
• Entrepreneurship involves developing the right beliefs, increasing skill sets, and cultivating character traits to ensure success.
• An example from my own experience: A friend's fitness app revenue jumped from $20k to $150k per month once he overcame his limiting belief and began promoting it.
• In my journey, shifting from owning gyms to licensing others dramatically increased yearly revenue from $2-3 million to $28 million due to a belief change suggested by a mentor.
• The alignment of beliefs, skills, and character traits at each level of entrepreneurship is crucial for reaching higher financial milestones.
• To address deficits in these areas, focus on evidence that supports or counters your self-assessment instead of ungrounded affirmations.
• Recognize that identity and traits like patience or integrity can be developed according to business needs, often by recalling and reinforcing past instances where you've exhibited them.
• Employ a mental strategy of arguing against negative self-beliefs to cultivate positive character traits actively, shifting eventually from active to passive self-conception.
• Overcoming personal hurdles like insecurities, anxieties, and perceived traumas can significantly contribute to professional success, as they often limit business growth more than skills or beliefs.
• Adopting the mindset that trauma does not define you allows for more rapid and controlled emotional and business development.
• Choosing to change who you are by the stories you tell yourself can lead to profound transformation both personally and in business.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest first re-writing the stories you've been telling yourself. If the inner talk is saying, "I'm not good enough," change it to something positive, like "I can succeed with what I have to offer." This changes your beliefs, which is the first step.

Next, identify the skills you need to improve. For example, if you struggle with sales, start learning about it. Read books, take courses, or watch videos to improve this skill. It's just like filling up a tool box – the more tools (skills) you have, the better you can build (succeed).

Then, focus on your character traits. Are you disciplined? Are you focused? If not, remember times when you were. Tell yourself stories about those times. This helps you believe you can be that way again. It’s like drawing a map to where you need to go, using the paths you've already walked.

If you lack patience or integrity, think back to when you did show these qualities. Say, "I am patient because I once waited for…" or "I am honest because I once spoke the truth when…". This strengthens the trait in your mind, making it easier to act on.

Finally, stop letting past traumas hold you back. Instead of saying, "I am anxious because of my past," say, "I am calm because I choose to control my reactions now." It’s like deciding to stop letting an old wound hurt you.

By working on your stories, skills, and traits, you'll see your business grow. Because when you change who you are, you change what you can do. It's all about shaping yourself to be the person who can reach the success you're aiming for.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Entrepreneurship is about three things: it's about changing the beliefs that you have, it's about increasing the skill set that you have, and then the character traits that go along with that to make sure the skills are successful."

– Alex Hormozi

"What's the evidence that you're so bad at this? What's the evidence that you have cause you keep beating yourself up about this but what's your evidence?"

– Alex Hormozi

"Your identity is fluid, and you need to be able to change your identity and your character traits based on what the business requires if you want to grow."

– Alex Hormozi

"Strategy means what do you say no to that still looks like it makes sense on paper. That's strategy."

– Alex Hormozi

"I am wise because I use the same formula that most people use to destroy themselves with insecurities, with negative character traits, to rebuild myself."

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

the most powerful things that change our behavior and our character are the stories we tell ourselves i think that when i started out in business uh i've heard i heard all these things in the personal development space like uh you should have you should read these affirmations every morning blah blah blah i never did that and it was because it felt stupid to me now that being said there might be some people who've had life-changing results from doing that but what i did notice is that the stories i would tell myself about myself were the things that changed my beliefs they were the things that changed my character and so a lot of times in some of my other videos i've talked about how entrepreneurship is about three things it's about changing the beliefs that you have it's about increasing the skill set that you have and then the character traits that go along with that to make sure the skills are successful so i'll give you a simple example for this so a friend of mine he started a fitness app um he was doing about twenty thousand a month he was a top game uh crossfit games competitor um but he was really ashamed because he wasn't the winner he was like you know really really highly ranked one but he wasn't the winner and so he believed that his app wasn't good enough and so he never promoted it so it grew to 20 000 a month in revenue with him doing zero promotion right and when he realized that it was okay for him to promote it and people got a lot of value from it in the app was good enough he went from 20 000 a month to like 150 000 a month like that and the difference was his beliefs his skills were the same right his character traits are the same he changed his beliefs right so let me give you a different example so when i actually started out getting in my own business right i uh i had a chain of gyms this was a very very you know this was ten years ago i had changed gyms i knew how to run sales teams i knew how to generate leads i need to do all these things um but what ended up happening was i had one missing piece which was also a belief darn i was actually trying to give you a different one but i had a mentor come in and say you need to be you need to get in the licensing business you need to license this model to lots of people rather than doing the actual model yourself and so um i did make that transition and then we went from i think you know i think we did like two or three million dollars to doing seven and the next year we did 28 million so the year that we made the transition halfway through is what jumped us from two or three to seven and it was just in the last like four months that we saw this crazy growth and then we did 28 million the next year and so it was because i had all these skills and i also had the character traits i just needed again to change my beliefs i was trying to give you an example with the character traits let me think of one so if you have uh for example if i had had those skills but i didn't have the character traits of being disciplined and being focused on one thing i would have jumped uh between multiple you know entrepreneurial endeavors and never been able to see success because even though i had the beliefs about what was possible um like if i'd said okay i'm gonna do gyms and i'm gonna do chiropractors and i'm gonna do dentists i'm gonna do x y and z right until i had the character trait of focus the character trait of discipline um then i would not have seen the success right and so the next natural question is okay well if i have to have aligned beliefs skills and character traits at each level of the ladder because you can have and this is what's crazy when you see the overnight successes this is what happens i want to describe it to you so you understand it and how you can do it so let's say that there's a ladder all right and you've got this pole on one side you've got the pole on the other side and you've got the middle bar okay you need all three to move to the next level of the ladder right and so for example you might have the left side built up six stories above where you're at and you might have uh the right side build up six stories you know uh are you know ten stories from where you're at right now but all of a sudden if you change your character and that character trait development gives you three more rungs all of a sudden you go three rungs because you already have the constraint has been removed and so you can be more advanced in your beliefs than you on your skills or it can be more advanced in your character trait than you are in your skills or you can be more advanced in your skills than your own your beliefs right and so it's having all three of those that are checked off at each level of entrepreneurship that gets you to one one million dollars a year three million or ten million dollars or a hundred million dollars or whatever it is right is you have to have all of them and so what i the point of this video and i'm gonna is is to get you to understand how to actually develop those soft things because the skills are straightforward right the skills are you just go by the course and you read the book and you consume the content like this and you practice you apply right that's what you have to do that's it that's it right um one of the skills that i see lots of marketers these days not have is they don't know how to sell they don't know how to develop a sales team they don't know how to manage and grow a sales team they don't want to lead a sales team that's a skill they don't have and as soon as they do they go from 3 million to 10 million like that very very easily right it's understanding that that's the skill deficit and as soon as they do it boom they blow up i was fortunate because i had a ton of the skills in my skill toolbox but i went from making nothing to tons because i had all of these rungs of this ladder already built out to a 30 million dollar level except i just didn't have the beliefs that was my issue candidly i suffer from a lot of insecurities and so my wife was the one who was like you can do this like you don't have to have these gyms like you can license out the model like you can you can really succeed like this and i honestly just thought she was a really smart person and very wise and so i trusted her belief in me before i really trusted it for myself and so hopefully you can have something like that in your life but maybe that that could be me i trust in your i trust in your your skills and your beliefs so so hopefully you can borrow some of that trust because i promise you the world does get better when you when you take those leaps of faith but the point is is if you have these three things right the stories that you tell yourself right one of the things that layla always says is my wife she has her own channel you can check it out um is she's like what's the evidence right what's the evidence that you're so bad at this what's the evidence that you have cause you keep beating yourself up about this but what's your evidence right and so what i do when i identify a character trait that i lack or identify a skill that i don't have or a belief that i don't have and this one i'll just specifically talk about the character traits because i think it's really important it's probably the one that people struggle with the most what are the stories that you tell yourself about yourself right a lot of times i had dinner recently with a 5 million year entrepreneur and he was like i had a lot of trauma when i was a kid and that's why i am this way he speaks like he is this way because and i was like i think that's a really convenient story to tell yourself about why you are anxious or why you exhibit anxious tendencies i was like but what if you did that and you just didn't exhibit anxious tendencies what then what if you just chose not to what if you chose to not give power to that situation or that parent uh when you were growing up why why they already made you suffer why would you let them make you suffer more by telling yourself that they gave you this character trait then it's because it's uncomfortable for you to suffer through the change of changing your identity right but layla and i both believe this is that your identity is fluid and you need to be able to change your identity and your character traits based on what the business requires if you want to grow right like if you're not a patient person then you need to become patient macro micro speed macro patients right if you want to develop a reputation you need to become a person of integrity which means sometimes short term you have to sacrifice right you have to not make the quick buck if you want to be disciplined and have focus and it means that you have to be able to say no strategy means what do you say no to that still looks like it makes sense on paper that's strategy that's what it is it's what things do we choose not to invest in right and the people who learn how to make the most money are the ones who know how to focus and that's a character trait and so what you have to do is you have to appeal in your past and say when did i exhibit these things because all of us have exhibited these character traits at some point in our life and then what you do is you say i am this way because and then you tell yourself the stories of the things you did in the past that exhibited those traits and by doing that you'll start reminding yourself so if i want to say like because i'll tell you i used to have more angry tendencies i used to tend and trend towards being angry as a response to things that i didn't like right but one of the things that i liked like that i try and tell myself is that i am wise right and this is a character trait that's probably been the number one character trait that i've tried to develop over the however many years just because i believe discernment is the single greatest character trait you can have because if you make the right decisions the whole world is your oyster right if you can make the right call the whole world is your oyster and so for me wisdom is the number one character trait that i wish to develop and so when i think to myself i am wise because i use the same formula that you that most people and most of us myself included use to destroy ourselves with these insecurities with these with these negative character traits that we believe we have and instead of saying an affirmation you tell yourself the story of why what you're saying is true you learn to argue against your own thoughts and that's how you start developing this muscle this these traits that start to become a whisper and then a shout and then they become they emanate from you and you project them when you walk in the room subconsciously but it's a practice that goes from active to passive in your mind right if you are a patient person if you are a kind person if you are an integris person right if you're a hard-working person right we all have these stories that we tell about ourselves and so if you have a limitation right now on your character trait or traits you don't feel like you are patient enough you feel like you are too easily distracted you feel like you don't focus enough then you need to start telling yourself the story i am this way because not i am wealthy stupid in my opinion i think our brains are too smart for that stuff you have to give it the reasons you have to make the argument and i think instead of affirmations if you make affirmations into arguments that you make with yourself every day then those become things that will change who you are and if you change who you are and how you make decisions you'll change your entire life and you'll be able to watch your business grow as a result of who you have become and so this is one of the things that was most powerful for me in my entrepreneurial journey i had had tons of insecurities right i had tons of anxieties i had lots of anger i had lots of perceived trauma and i'll say it that way because i don't even want to make it into trauma that's what i perceived as trauma because i was a child in the world with the the regular the emotional regulation of a child and so things of course affect you more when your kid everyone's traumatized traumatized perceives trauma as a child like if i go to a stage and i say hey who here had a traumatic childhood in some instance or had a traumatic event occur everyone's going to raise their hand so stop thinking that because you have trauma and i don't say this i'll say this with it i'll say it this way better for me i chose to stop giving trauma power and i think if you can do that and you can tell yourself a different story about why you are who you are and make arguments instead of affirmations you'll be able to have stronger faster change in the direction that you desire and you'll have more control over your emotional state and then in so doing you'll be able to level up the business that you have because most of times when i see business owners the reason they're not successful is not because they don't have the beliefs or because they don't have the skills it's just because of who they are i'd call the other day and somebody hopped on and they were like ah and honestly the guy was an he was like man employees suck and i can never keep any good talent blah blah blah blah and i just paused and i was like that's not surprising and he was like what i was like have you met you like i don't know what else to say have you met you like i don't need to change this guy's marketing right i don't need to change this guy's beliefs about his own business he's just to change who he is right and the only way for that guy to do that is for him to get over the reasons that he tells himself it's okay to be who he is and i think a lot of us do that we give ourselves the excuse for being impatient we give ourselves the excuse for cheating right we give ourselves the excuse for being unfaithful you get the excuse for being unloyal well my dad was where my mom was or my brother was or whatever right or when i was growing up or went from my town i xyz i'm this way because the cows is one of the most powerful words in the english language it's great for persuasion make sure you use it to persuade yourself in the right direction so anyways that's just my two cents i might not know anything um if you found value in this hit subscribe i have other videos that like this for entrepreneurs who are trying to uh scale their businesses uh keeping awesome keep being amazing lots of love mosey national guys see you guys in the next video bye