5 Limiting Beliefs That Hold Entrepreneurs Back From Success

Regardless of where you’re at in your entrepreneurial journey, it’s likely that you could be getting a lot more out of what you already have.

Two people, with the same exact resources – time, money, knowledge, etc can take the same exact business, yet experience drastically different results.

Sadly, the majority of us make progress a lot slower than we could be – even if our time or budgets are limited.

Why is that?

Most frequently, it comes down to mindset.

The average person experiences thousands of thoughts every hour. What we allow ourselves to think and believe has a lot more of an effective than we realize. Positivity, optimism and self-belief will not magically make you successful, but there are real self-limiting beliefs that affect business owners, and have direct, measurable negative consequences.

In this article, I’m going to address some of these limiting beliefs with you – and show you how reframing some of your thoughts can yield tangible improvements for your company. Funny enough, these are all thoughts I’ve had myself at some point!

1. I Can Do It Alone

You shouldn’t feel bad for being a solopreneur – the only person working within your company. At the same time, you probably shouldn’t feel good about it either.

Believing that you need to – or you should be running your business by yourself is one of the most common thing I hear from new entrepreneurs. However, this belief almost always stems from either pride or insecurity.

If you’re a solopreneur, you may feel that you can’t trust anyone else to work with the same level of quality and care that you put into your company. You may fear them making mistakes, or not doing things as good as you can do them. To some degree, that may actually be true.

The problem is that when you’re by yourself, there are quite literally a number of limits that you will never be able to surpass.

There are only 24 hours in a day. No matter how hard or how efficiently you’re able to utilize those hours, you will always have a limited amount.

On the other hand, you can scale other people’s time limitlessly.

Sure, your first hire may not be able to do the job quite as good as you can. But what if they could do it 80% as well? Wouldn’t that still save you at least a little bit of time, allowing you to focus on something more important?

When it comes down to it, a business owners work in the long-term is not to carry out all of the day-to-day work, but to develop profitable systems.

If you can pay an employee to deliver more value than what you are paying for them, you have a foundation for scaling that you would never be able to achieve on your own.

You do not have to do this alone, nor should you.

If you want to get started with your first hire, I highly recommend bringing on a virtual assistant from the Philippines. Full-time assistants can be hired for as little as $4-500 / month, and will free up time for you to focus on improving your business’ bottom line.

2. I Need Total Control

This one ties in heavily with the last one.

As entrepreneurs, we start our own businesses because we want to be in control of our own destiny. We want to live life on our own terms, doing what we truly care about, rather than being a cog in someone else’s vision.

The problem is, we cannot possibly control every little aspect of our company. This is true even if you are the only person running it.

We cannot control the choices of our customers, our vendors, our network, family, or the economy. Even if you do everything right, one or more of these things may not go in your favor.

This is a hard fact to accept, but ultimately we must if we want to be able to grow. I understand that, because I have been there.

In 2016, I lost a child I had been taking care of, and desperately wanted to adopt. It was a very difficult time for me – by far the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. To be completely honest, I feel fortunate to still be alive.

One of the consequences of this was that I became completely obsessed with control. I could not accept that somebody else had the power to take (what felt like) my daughter away from me. Even when I was ready to pursue entrepreneurship again, I sought control over everything, at all costs.

But that is a problem.

As we’ve already discussed, fear and insecurity prevent you from being willing to delegate. It also forces you to spread yourself too thin – trying to involve yourself and influence the outcome of every little aspect of your business. This just isn’t possible.

At the same time, the desire for control prevents people from taking risks, in which they can’t directly influence the outcome. Controlling people cannot stand to be wrong, and have something go against their expectations.

When you can accept that some things will happen – regardless of whether or not you played in a part in it, your mind becomes free.

Then, you can make much better decisions.

3. A Belief Regarding Profit And Budget

Out of all the revenue that your business generates, how much gets put back into the business?

Having coached so many entrepreneurs over the years, I very rarely see clients strike this balance right when we first start working together.

In fact, they usually fall into one of two extremes – either they pour every spare dollar back into the company (leaving nothing for themselves), or they take every dollar that they can out, stagnating the company’s growth and jeopardizing its long-term health.

Both of these are bad, but for different reasons.

Pouring Everything Back Into The Company

At first glance, this may seem like the smart and wise thing to do. Surely re-investing back into the company is the best way to scale it quickly, right?

To a degree, this is true. Some additional profit should rightly go back into the business, scaling systems that are working and developing new projects. I don’t think many people would argue with that.

However, once your company has healthy revenue and has actually gotten off the ground a little bit, re-investing every dollar points to a problem.

Many business owners think that more revenue is the answer to all their problems – that they will be able to start paying themselves if they just make a little more money. Unfortunately, as more money comes in, the business owner takes on new expenses, and ultimately never ends up getting paid.

If your system is profitable, there is already money there for you take without stifling your company’s growth.

Believing that every dollar needs to be reinvested for your company to survive, probably means that there are structural changes that need to be made.

Because let’s face it – there will always be something new for your company to spend money on. At the same time, you should also be able to start projects in a lean matter.

If you want to break this cycle, I highly recommend checking out the book ‘Profit First‘ on Amazon. I’ve recommended it to countless entrepreneurs who feel stuck and unable to take profit out of their business, and it has helped them tremendously.

Taking Everything Out Of The Company

This one is just as bad.

Taking every spare dollar out of your company indicates that you aren’t sure how to multiply money within your company, or you don’t believe enough in your company to justify the reinvestment. Because if you knew with certainty that you could double your money by keeping it within your business, most rational people would pursue that.

The natural state of a business is to grow, and that comes most easily when reinvesting a bit of the profit.

As with most things in business, there must be a balance.

4. My Product Or Service Isn’t Good Enough

We all want to make our customers as happy as possible.

Sometimes however, we take this too far. And in fact, many entrepreneurs never even end up launching their product or service because they fear it isn’t good enough.

Of course, the only way to know that for sure is to test it out in the marketplace.

We are our own worst critics, and being experts of our craft, we will always see room for improvement in one area or another.

We may not feel that our product is worth the price that we are charging for it. However, our actual customers may be buying for different reasons than you would expect, and they may judge the product’s value differently than you or I would.

Your product or service does not have to be perfect to get started. Even if you do feel it reaches perfection, your customers may not feel the same way.

Therefore, it’s much smarter to build your product up to the point where it can deliver on its promises – then tweak and improve upon it as you receive feedback from actual paying customers.

This way, you build products that your customers actually want.

5. I Won’t Make It

This is one of the hardest ones to address.

It’s also one of the deadliest, because it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you genuinely believe that you won’t make it, why bother trying, right? You may still put the hours in, but without the same level of excitement, gusto, and creativity that your business could actually benefit from.

What you pay attention to and believe in, grows. Not because of magic or the ‘law of attraction’, but because you work longer, harder, and more efficiently without becoming burned out.

When you believe that your actions will yield the results you’re hoping for, you are more likely to give it your all.

The opposite is also true. If you don’t believe in your business, you will often do the bare-minimum you need to keep it afloat, but rarely any more than that.

This is why understanding your own personal psychology can be so beneficial. What motivates you? What events cause you to believe in your business more? What events take away that belief?

By having a thorough understanding on how your mind works and what things shape it, you can begin taking steps to improve it.

Success Simplified – Building A Mindset For Success

When I realized that it was my mindset holding me back from business growth, a lightbulb went off in the head.

I already knew all of the tactics and strategies I needed to grow. The problem was – at that time, I was not the right person to utilize them.

I poured all of my spare time into studying how the world’s most successful people think. How do they approach problems? How do they move past hardships? How do they stay so motivated and continue to accomplish so much, despite the fact they no longer need to work?

More importantly, how could I use all of this information to develop tangible improvements for my company and for my life?

I’ve compiled all of my research and lessons into my success mindset course, which I’m currently selling for $97.

Out of all the courses I sell on my website, I consider this one to be probably the most important. All of the strategies and tactics in the world do not matter if your mindset is broken. The importance of mindset is still dramatically underestimated.

Again, two people – with the exact same company and the exact same resources, can have drastically different results solely based on their mindset.

Learn more about the course by clicking here!

Conclusion

Although this list of limiting beliefs certainly isn’t complete, I consider these five to be some of the most important.

If you’ve told yourself any of these things before, I’d love to hear more about it. Our own thoughts can hurt or help us more than we realize, and gaining control over them is almost like its own superpower.

Share your story with me through the comment form below, or get in touch with me through email.

I look forward to hearing from you!

To your success,

– James McAllister