Limiting Beliefs In Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is hard, and we don’t need to invent ways of making it harder:

·      It’s notoriously tricky to find the right balance of Desirable, Feasible and Viable.

·      We don’t have the predictable corporate structures in place that offer pay raises and promotions.

·      Change is constant and guaranteed, with little certainty to cling to.

·      We’re constantly making tradeoff decisions, choosing what to prioritise and what to relinquish.

Entrepreneurship is rewarding too, as it’s rarely boring and you have a great deal of influence over your journey.
You get to work with great people, you have skin in the game, you get to sign your name on your work.
Every day is different, and instead of waiting to get picked, you get to pick yourself.

And yet, it is the nature of modern entrepreneurs to make the process harder by adding in new rules, constraints and high expectations.
They seem like they’re good for us, but upon closer examination we can see what they really are: limiting beliefs.

This is not a fluffy or soft topic either, it drastically affects business performance and the future of your company.
It shapes your strategy, your goals, your speed of execution, and how you treat your team.
Let’s look at some examples of beliefs that might be hindering your business’ growth, and a framework for working through your own situation.

Small Tweaks That Make Your Work Easier

We’ll start with some of the clear and tangible scenarios that you might find familiar.
A relevant one for every business owner and aspiring entrepreneur: goal setting.
Everyone will tell you that goals are helpful or even essential, but so many people pick terrible goals that either don’t motivate a change in behaviour, or send you down the wrong path.

One major cause of poor goalsetting is picking measurements that are out of your control, e.g. winning an award, impressing an influential person, or outperforming your competitors.
They’re all great things, but they are also incredibly vague right up until the end.
You won’t know how you’re tracking, or whether you’re doing enough of the right things.
It’s understandable, logically people think “if this is successful, it will be highly acclaimed”.
But that quickly transitions to “this is only successful if it’s highly acclaimed”.
An actor can’t wake up each day and decide to win an Oscar, but they can decide how to turn up to set, how to treat the media and put the work into their auditions.
Entrepreneurship isn’t about “getting picked” by an authority, it’s about picking yourself to do something difficult and valuable.

Another misstep is to choose goals centred around lag measures – a number of sales, an amount of followers, a level of media coverage.
They’re good and they’re essential, but they’re also only visible well after the important/hard work has happened.
That means founders decide that they cannot be proud or satisfied until the lag measures hit a certain point.
The lead measures, by contrast, are the ones you can influence each day, like making calls to customers, time spent training your team, creating video content or new iterations of your products/services.
These make for good goals because you can set targets around a level of effort, rather than a level of external recognition.
The lead measures should lead to the important lag measures, but you’re not waiting for praise and validation.

Then there’s the issue of the word “And…”.
Entrepreneurs tie themselves in knots when they choose several good ambitions and connect them with the word “And...”
e.g. We need to make a decent amount of money AND we need to serve the most disadvantaged communities AND we need go to market in the next twelve months.
Or We need to be the best in our field, AND the cheapest, AND the most ethically made.
Or We need to create something truly innovative AND popular AND it can’t afford to fail.
Each element is admirable, but it might be easier to tackle in several pieces rather than one perfect project.
As Will Dayble said “It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too, maybe what you really want is two small cakes?”.
i.e. one to have, and one to eat.
A product that is a cash cow, and a product that is a loss leader.
A job that pays your bills and a passion project that lights you up.
A product for the mass market and a product for niche specialists.
A guaranteed crowdpleaser and a moonshot.
A version you can take to market for rapid feedback, and a version to show your risk-averse project partners.

Another controversial suggestion is Adam Savage’s advice on buying tools and toys, and how to save your money until you know what you really need:
“Buy cheap tools until you know what you really need from that tool, then buy the best one you can afford.”
It delays the bigger purchases until you know more about how you’ll use each tool, at which point you’ll have a more sophisticated understanding of what “best” means.
To be clear, this shouldn’t be controversial – it’s helpful for startups to save money and this lean approach is very sensible – but what happens is it hits a nerve for some founders.
They find the idea of cheap tools and free resources to be…unflattering.
It’s not the image they want to convey.
They don’t want to create work that is unpolished.
They know people will see the work, and worry they will be judged accordingly.
And besides, they are determined to build something big, so buying something that won’t last seems wasteful.
All of these are clues that there are deeper beliefs driving and limiting their choices every step of the way.

When Is A Belief A Limiting Belief?

There are lots of good beliefs that contradict each other, so we’re not here to judge or make absolute proclamations for all startups.
A limiting belief is different in that it removes options from the table, or makes their work significantly harder, forcing the entrepreneur into certain choices and declaring some options as taboo.
These often sound mean spirited, to the point where the person holding the belief would not apply these rules to their friends or anyone else.
e.g. “I can’t show people any prototypes, because they’ll steal my idea and all of my work will be ruined” or “I can’t show people any prototypes, because they will see my work as shoddy and imperfect and they’ll never take me seriously again”.
In both cases, the founder is ruling out a step of the design process, which is almost never a good idea, and is a move that your competitors are unlikely to imitate.

Kate Nethercott Wilson has a good prompt for finding your own limiting beliefs:

“I am not ___________ enough”.

Another is “I can’t attempt ___________ because it will results in _____(catastrophe)____”

These are like magnets that draw out your fearful nonsense, you’ve probably already thought of 1-2 keywords you use for yourself.
e.g. I am not old enough, popular enough, smart enough, safe enough, rich enough, creative enough, free enough, brave enough, connected enough, prepared enough.
It will result in failure, embarrassment, lawsuits, bankruptcy, career stasis, a blemish on my resume, selling my home, becoming a pariah, etc.
In almost every case, these stakes are not real, they are justifications for not taking any sort of creative risk disguised as sensible foresight.

Facts vs Fake News

A devastatingly effective process for separating stories into their base components is what Kate Nethercott Wilson calls “Facts vs Fake News”.
Once you start talking about the stories in your head, you get a friend/coach to draw two lists – the facts of the situation, and any fake news you’ve invented.
The scribe is in charge of summarising your points, and in exchange, you get final say on which column each point goes in.
A fact is something that is verifiably true – it is not emotional, a stranger could confirm its validity.
Facts can be positive or negative, they can describe your feelings and perceptions if we label them appropriately.
Fake news is a story that may feel true, but can’t be proven or wouldn’t be fair to apply to someone else in your position.

For example, facts for a random founder might include:

·      I have three customers today

·      I’ve had referrals and repeat business

·      I have not spent much time on my website

·      I’ve not researched ways of optimising my landing pages

Fake news in this scenario might include:

·      No one wants what we offer

·      My competitors are 10x better than us

·      My website is a joke

·      I will never be good at marketing

The facts don’t always paint the most glowing picture, and they often highlight gaps and opportunities for you to work on.
But at least they are fair, and almost always “figureoutable”.
Fake news feels venomous, critical and permanent.
i.e. you’re bad at this, down to your DNA, and it will never change.

When you lay out your stories in this framework, not only will it feel cathartic, but it’s also quite funny.
The stories that we tell ourselves are laughable when we say them out loud.

The Good Questions Column

Rather than grasping for answers, the best next step is to create a list of good questions that can be explored over time, often without a predetermined conclusion.
These questions can challenge you, set out helpful work to be done, offer some optimistic reframing, and set up more conversations for growth.
Some examples include:

·      Do I want to build this, or do I want to want to build this?

·      Could this unease be a tremendous source of fuel and direction?

·      Is it possible that we’ve been a bit naïve about the reality of this industry, and this “reality check” was probably overdue?

·      Who could help me with accountability and follow-through with my projects?

·      What if I get hyper-clear on my financials?

·      When does it become “safe” to buy our next assets to grow the business?

·      Do we want more work, or more status/praise?

As a final step, you can agree on a top 2-3 questions to prioritise using prompts like:

·      Which questions are most impactful for our work?

·      Which questions would I enjoy working on?

·      Which questions will make everything else easier or obsolete?

Figureoutable vs Permanent Roadblocks

Marie Forleo describes three rules:
Rule 1. All problems (or dreams) are figureoutable.
Rule 2. If a problem is not figureoutable, it’s not really a problem – it’s a fact of life or law of nature (e.g., death or gravity).
Rule 3. You may not care enough to figure this problem out or achieve this particular dream. That’s ok. Find another problem or dream that ignites a blazing fire in your heart and go back to Rule 1.

The way to figure out your problems might come through:

·      Learning a skill

·      Hiring a professional

·      Building a pretotype/prototype

·      Talking to customers

·      Talking to investors

·      Creating different versions of products/services and testing them in the market

They’re not easy, but they are at least democratic and accessible.
You will not be prevented from these because of who you are or where you’ve been.

Every entrepreneur will face problems, setbacks and challenges, but remarkably few of them will be permanently devastating.
If you find yourself taking strange actions or no actions, it might be a sign that there are some limiting beliefs interfering with your work.
These may be heavy and deeply rooted topics, ones that might benefit from talking with a qualified specialist, expert or counsellor, rather than your family or co-founders.
Talking about these with people unequipped to handle the conversation appropriately can make the situation worse.

It’s ok to quit, it’s ok to minimise risk, it’s ok to not enjoy difficult tasks and feel drained by emotional labour.
But if your beliefs and stories are telling you to avoid the work at all costs, then these stories aren’t compatible with entrepreneurship.
And that’s the ultimate test of a story: is this belief still serving me well?
If it doesn’t serve you well, it’s time for new narratives and beliefs.

You can find more examples of Kate’s work at Resources Reimagined.