SELF-SABOTAGE cost me $30,000,000 [the cure to self-sabotage]
Summary
- I once self-sabotaged my company, resulting in a nearly $30 million loss.
- This mistake stemmed from my fear of firing people and facing hard conversations.
- I found myself unable to let go of employees who no longer fit our fast-growing company.
- My belief was that firing people would mean I was a bad leader, which was irrational.
- The delay in taking action allowed incompetence to spread within the company's leadership.
- To overcome sabotaging beliefs, I used the ABCs (Activating event, Belief, Consequence) framework coined by Albert Ellis.
- The ABCs helped me identify the belief and recognize its negative consequences.
- I disputed the belief by asking four questions about evidence, contrary evidence, absolutes, and potential outcomes of holding the belief.
- By changing this belief, I could finally revamp our team, fire necessary people, and move forward.
- Growth is less about skill sets and more about the ability to change beliefs quickly.
- Many entrepreneurs hold irrational beliefs about firing, delegation, and their own indispensability.
- You can learn any skill, including delegation, but irrational beliefs can hinder progress.
- To alter beliefs, I recommend disputing them with questions for at least 10 minutes a day.
- This practice helped me take action against irrational beliefs and improve as a business owner.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest first recognizing when you're avoiding tough decisions, like firing someone who isn't a good fit anymore. It's important to face these fears because not doing it can hurt your business a lot. Here's a simple way to work on changing bad beliefs that make you scared or hold you back:
Understand the ABCs framework:
- A stands for Activating Event: This is something that happens in your business, like needing to fire someone.
- B is for Belief: What do you think about that event? Maybe you believe you're a bad leader if you fire someone.
- C means Consequence: How does this belief make you feel? Scared, stressed, or stuck, maybe?
Dispute that belief by asking yourself four questions:
- Is there any evidence that this belief is true?
- Is there any evidence to the contrary?
- Do I believe in absolutes (all good or all bad) about this?
- What bad things will happen if I keep this belief?
By writing down these questions and answers for at least 10 minutes every day, you can start to see if your belief is really true or just something you're afraid of. This can help you make better choices for your business without those fears getting in the way.
If you're struggling with delegation, it's the same. Learn the skills from videos or articles, but remember, it's often not the skill you're missing—it's the belief that you can do it.
So, remember to:
- Face hard conversations.
- Use the ABCs to fix bad beliefs.
- Question those beliefs every day.
- Learn new skills, but also work on changing what you believe.
Doing these things can make a huge difference in your business and help you grow as a leader.
Quotes by Leila Hormozi
"I was sabotaging myself because I had an irrational belief"
– Leila Hormozi
"I let this get out of control, I should have taken care of this when the problem was small"
– Leila Hormozi
"It's not the fancy marketing and finance and acquisition and sales…that's going to you if you don't know it"
– Leila Hormozi
"If you want to find brown, you'll find the color brown"
– Leila Hormozi
"I can choose the misery…or I can choose the fear anxiety stress etc that comes with changing that belief"
– Leila Hormozi
Full Transcript
want to talk about is how i self-sabotaged my company and cost us nearly 30 million dollars so this actually stemmed from uh a conversation i had with a different entrepreneur who was talking about why he could not scale this company and you know in talking to him he essentially said like i'm just not able to fire people and i can't get rid of people and i have a really hard time having any kind of hard conversations and so you know i was like can i see your org chart because you can tell a lot about a business if you look at the work chart i looked at the org chart and i was like holy um like i mean i think they had probably 40 too many people working there the reason for that was he's just like i don't want to fire people i just he kept saying like i can't do it like i just can't it actually reminded me of myself i want to say five years ago and that was just the first year that we started in business and we had to hire a lot of people and i knew that the business was growing so quickly that a lot of those people that were there weren't any longer going to be a fit in 6 12 18 months because of the size of the business not because of anything with them but like i can't train you i don't have anyone that can train you and you don't have the skills 12 months later it's really hard for them to continue to be a fit for the business and so that's just kind of the nature of fast growth companies now my the reason that i sabotaged myself the reason i sabotaged the company was because i held a belief too tight that wasn't serving me but it was protecting me from what i thought would be worse that belief was that i am not um a good boss a good leader if i fire these people i remember sitting at my desk at one point in time and there were so many things falling through the cracks and i kept thinking myself crap like i just know that like half the people on our leadership team just aren't competent it's not that they're bad people it's not that they aren't in the right position it's that the company's grown too fast and they no longer have the competency to rise for that skill but i was so terrified of what it would mean about me if i fired those people that i kept delaying it and so you know what happens when you delay firing a few people those people continue to hire people on their teams and they're not hiring with the right frame of mind right because those people shouldn't be on the team why should they have the authority to hire anyone but i didn't stop it and so this multiplied and it became you know the one day i looked at the team and i was like mother i was like like most of the team shouldn't be here and not most of the team i wanna say like a third and i was like crap i was like i let this get out of control i should have taken care of this when the problem was small and it all stemmed from the fact that i was sabotaging myself because i had an irrational belief and so what i want to share with you is how i identified what that belief was and then what i did to act against it because here's the thing most the times in business it's not all the fancy marketing and finance and acquisition and sales and like all that stuff that's going to you if you don't know it it's going to not understanding your brain how it works and what beliefs you're operating with those are the things that end up you at the end of the day and i can tell you that from talking to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs as well as talking people who are way ahead of me right and they can identify the same reasons that they falter at times they fail at times or times they haven't been successful it's almost always having an irrational belief that you are acting in accordance with and so this is a little bit of psychology uh and a little bit of business mixed in two because i do believe that's what holds us back the most and so i'm excited to share with you today if you're trying to identify what the belief is that's holding you back there's a framework that you can use and let me tell you there are a ton of people out there right now who are teaching this framework in one way shape or form it comes from agent philosophers nobody made it up nowadays okay it's like uh you know how do you respond to situations okay it's called the abcs and that's uh what albert ellis coined it so he said it's the abcs of uh essentially cognitive behavioral therapy or rational behavior rational emotive behavioral therapy and so what that is is it's a therapy that you can do on yourself and so i'm going to walk you through a piece of it because honestly this is the key that can unlock um how you can change your own beliefs and you don't need to rely on someone else to do it for you what a lot of people have spun off different ways of talking about this or doing this is just the abcs and so i'll tell you what they stand for okay you've got the a which is the activating event you've got the b that is the belief you have about that event and then you've got the c which is the consequence of that belief that you hold on that event okay so let me explain what i mean here in the scenario where i'm talking about where i sabotage our business and the reason i'm saying that we that cost us 30 million dollars is because it set us back an entire year you know we didn't we weren't able at one point to make apparently any progress because i had to redo half of our leadership team and it took a long time let's look at the activating event right activating event was my team up and i looked at the team and said oh crap you know like i feel like i need to let go of some people and that was exactly what happened right okay so activating event team messed up they dropped the ball belief about that event that i held that time was crap i am not a good leader if i fire them i'm not a good leader i can't fire anyone because that'll mean that i'm a bad leader okay and c the emotional and uh you know thought provoking consequence that belief creates in me was anxiety stress fear feeling like a failure you know low self-esteem whatever right just feeling like and so that is what the belief did and so it created this perpetual cycle where i felt worse and worse about myself and so i put it off longer and longer to take care of you know replacing those teammates and bringing people who are more skilled if you hold a belief like that right if you can relate to this and you're like i have things that i believe and i know that those beliefs are holding me back from getting to where i need to go in business or making the moves i need to make in business right then i want you to do this i want you to take the abcs and write that down okay what's the activating event what's the belief and i'm gonna say irrational belief that you hold about that event and then what's see what's the consequence how do you feel holding that belief about that event here's how you dispute that belief okay so here's how i change beliefs for myself think about this all day when we have an irrational belief when we have something that's not serving us is all day we loop in our minds all the reasons why uh that belief is true so we just continue to collect evidence um you've probably heard tony robbins say you know if you want to find brown you'll find the color brown if you look for brown you find brown if you look for reasons for your belief to be true you will find reasons for your beliefs to be true what we don't do is we don't practice the opposite we don't dispute in our own heads with ourselves why that belief may be false and so i'll give you the example of how i disputed my belief and got myself to finally take action to revamp that team fire the people i needed to fire and get through it okay the irrational belief that i held okay the ib was that i am a bad leader and boss because i need to fire these people and i haven't yet that was my irrational belief okay i'm a bad leader because i haven't done this yet now there's four questions that i like to ask myself to dispute a belief and i took these from i think one of the workshops or uh worksheets from a workshop from albert ellis institute and this is what helped me overcome that belief okay number one is there any evidence that i am a bad boss okay is there any evidence hard evidence not opinion but hard evidence oftentimes you will find that there is no evidence evidence is a fact everyone else would be able to say the exact same thing there are opinions that exist i may have the opinion that i am maybe someone else has the opinion but there is no fact to say that i am okay so that's the first question i asked myself and when i came up with that question i was like well no there's no like hard facts to show it right there's not like a test i can take to say you're a bad boss it's just how i feel right now second question is there any evidence to the contrary is there any evidence that i am actually a good leader okay and when i asked myself that question i actually realized that there was a lot of evidence that i was a good leader if i looked at the feedback surveys if i looked at all the slacks i was getting from people if i looked at our office five results if i looked at the retention we had on most people if i looked at the results from why people came to work for us okay so there's actually a lot of evidence that i was a good leader okay fair enough now the third question is there any evidence that i'm absolutely no good at all okay because much of the time in our minds we have absolute thinking right which is we go one extreme or the other we're like i am all or nothing so is there evidence that i am actually just a horrible boss and nothing else well no there's no evidence to support that in fact i would say that's not true okay i don't even believe that okay fourth question what bad things will happen if i continue to hold this irrational belief okay so i think all day we're telling ourselves all the bad things that will happen if we let go of this belief but what we're not doing is saying well if i hold this belief what does my life look like what does my business turn out like what happens to me and so i asked myself that and i was like well if i don't change this belief i will literally never fire anybody and i will end up with an incompetent team and i'll end up with a miss you know i don't even know what kind of culture right like a hodgepodge of whatever the ends up with right and i will not have a the company that i want to have the company i would prefer to have and so that question right there was what did it for me i was like if i continue to operate under this belief and not act against it not think against it then my company is and so in that moment i realized i can choose the misery of continuing to dwell in that belief or i can choose the you know fear anxiety stress etc that comes with changing that belief you feel like either way and i can tell you this from experience i felt like not changing it i felt like while i was changing it on the other side though you get confidence and so that is how i disputed that belief and that's how i overcame that and i stopped sabotaging myself in business and so i've been able to take that i've been able to do pretty much every area of business people always ask like how do you grow quickly how do you do things quickly i don't think that growth is i don't associate it as much skill set as i do with your ability to change your beliefs quickly and we can do that for ourselves you don't need a therapist you don't need medication you don't need to watch a million or read a million books you can just apply these things right and you just practice practice practice practice like i said the four questions that you want to ask yourself okay is there any evidence that this is true is there any evidence that i should be a certain way or that thing should turn out a certain way is there any evidence that i am no good at all the situation is no good at all this person is no good at all and then what bad things will happen to me if i continue to hold this belief okay those are the questions that i ask myself so you can take this and you can apply it to anything i would say that a lot of people um hold really irrational beliefs about firing people people hold irrational beliefs around delegation people hold a lot of irrational beliefs around being the only person their company that can do something or conduct some sort of uh tactical task people hold a lot of irrational beliefs in business and they think that it's that they lack the skill but it's actually that they lack the belief because you can learn how to delegate if you just google how to delegate i have two videos here on how to delegate you know how now but you're not doing it for some reason it's because you have an irrational belief that you're holding on to and so if you can practice this and i would encourage you to do it every day when you're trying to change a belief just set aside and i time myself when i'm trying to for at least 10 minutes a day which i usually end up doing it for like an hour but 10 minutes gets you started then you will soon see that even if you are unsure and even if you don't 100 believe yourself right because belief is binary it's not binary it's not a continuum like you might believe 10 next day you might be 11 12 what if what you got one percent every day and then in a year you completely believe it right but even if you can just get yourself over the 50 line enough to take action against that irrational belief and actually move yourself and move your business forward then you're making a ton of progress and so i hope this is useful um i'm not even kidding like this is what i do all the time this is what i practice this is my journal this is what i do to make sure that i can continue to move forward in business is whenever there is something that i am not doing or something that i know i should be doing and i'm not doing or there's a strong emotion around a situation i just take this out i go abc what's the event what's the belief and then what's the consequence and then i dispute all of that and i write it down and so you could do this on the notes on your phone i usually do that like typically i'm not like a writer downer um or you could journal it or you could write it on your computer do whatever works for you but i highly suggest this um you know guys it's not it's not the skill stuff um that's going to continue to advance you or it's not the skills that are going to be like hinder you from growing your business more than often it's just the beliefs that you have and so if you can't grab those beliefs change those beliefs and continue to do that over and over again you will be a much more successful business owner so with that i hope you have a fantastic day night evening car ride walk exercise etc
