Avoid the #1 Mistake Entrepreneurs Make With Their Mental Game

Summary

Business is an intellectual sport, it pays off to learn what is the number one mistake entrepreneurs make, so you can avoid it and start having the results they will never get.

Transcript

Business is an intellectual sport, it pays off to learn what is the number one mistake all entrepreneurs make, so you can avoid it and start having the results they will never get. Let's get to it.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm Leon Castillo, founder of Selfmastered, a high performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck, their own performance. We transform the unproductive, overwhelming focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

So today, I want to talk about probably the most consistent mistake that I've seen throughout my careers when talking to entrepreneurs, right. So it doesn't really matter if you're someone who's been three decades in the game, or just three months, they all do the same mistake regarding their mindset. And this is really something dangerous, because it can trip you up to a point that you decide that it's just not worth pursuing that your business is just not worth pursuing anymore, because you're seeing your problems and your business difficulties from the wrong angle. And that mistake is equating your self worth to your business outcome.

In other words, having at variable pinion of your own self worth, depending on how good or bad are your business results. And that is a very dangerous road to walk. I've seen so many people get tripped up with this. And they end up jeopardizing their careers because they could not get out of the negative spiral that comes when you start thinking this way. And let me tell you a story about probably one of the best examples about this was a gentleman that we work together a few years ago, he was on his third startup he had had success in the past with his previous two startups both were sold one was okay sale day one was a good sale. And not he was in his third attempt. He wasn't that young anymore. And he was experienced he was looked up as some sort of Guru in his field to problem came when at the end of the fiscal year, he realized that the growth he had forecasted the business results that he thought his business were going to get we're just not there. They had made a major mistake in the forecast. And they were having a 40% less results at the end of the year, because he wasn't really in charge of it. Because he had someone he trusted to take care of that he was focused more on the PR and relationship, all that all that stuff. He just didn't pay enough attention to that. And when the surprise came, then he was totally devastated because he relied on those metrics on those growth metrics to raise another round. So what happened?

Well, this got under his skin, and he started thinking of himself as an imposter. He started feeling all of those negative emotions that come from imposter syndrome, even though he had had two businesses sold in the past. So he had a proven track record of success. But just because at that moment, those metrics were important. And he hadn't been up to the challenge. He started feeling terrible about himself, he started revisiting his whole life thinking terrible things and saying terrible things to himself. Not only that, he started taking his professional problems to his personal world, and he started having problems with his kids and his wife.

So I tell this story, because to me was one of the first cases that I was working on, and the person who was obviously very successful, and I thought to myself, if this happened to him, what would happen to those that haven't yet had their breakthrough? This really is something that is an underlying the psyche of most entrepreneurs. So how do we manage this situation? Well, by focusing his attention in three specific mental models that I believe help him, reverse the understanding of the situation, alter his perspective and start making progress again.

Now, before we share what are these three mental models, remember to like, subscribe, and hit the bell, so you never miss out on any juicy videos are released every week to help people you scale the business by accelerating your performance. So the number one thing is, of course, process over outcome. As you probably have heard before, we do not have control over the outcomes we get, we only have control over the processes that we follow and the system, the machine that we create, to try to get the outcomes we want.

So if we focus on the outcomes excessively, we are going to miss the forest for the trees and we're going to start getting off those negative emotions if things don't go as well, which is why we always say never judge yourself for your results. judge yourself for your performance. If you are giving everything you got every single day to get the results you want, but the result doesn't yet materialized that's already good enough because you're getting information about what you're doing.

Obviously, what you're doing is just not working but your performance is on point over a sufficiently long period of time. High Performance leads to high risk because you are trying iterating and doing stuff longer and more intensely, that someone that is not at that level of performance. So always value process over outcomes and focus on performance, not on results to change your self talk and embrace the beginner mindset.

And this is huge Jeff Bezos from Amazon always talks about being on day one. If you judge yourself for everything that you have accomplished in the past, it is very, very easy to get tripped up when things don't go as well as you expected them to go. If you see yourself as a perpetual beginner, someone that is in charge of his own development, everything that happens to him is a learning lesson, you will not waste time, self lamenting, and you will grow faster because constant self criticism is a negative feedback loop, right?

Bad performance lead to bad criticisms, which leads to more doubt which leads to lower performance, which in turn leads to better worse self criticism. So it is adamantly important that you never engage in negative self criticism by thinking that you should have known better that you should have gotten other results that you are really old enough or experienced enough or mature enough to have known better always see yourself as a beginner and a state and approach every problem from the perspective of a ticket.

And number three, and this is massive is learn to see yourself from a slightly detached perspective, do not identify with your thoughts and your emotions and your behavior. Identify with the person that can see itself from a certain perspective, because that's when you start making the necessary adjustments to your thoughts, your emotions and your behavior in order to go where you want to go. If you get too emotional. If you get to identify with the things you think the emotions you feel the behaviors you do, you will never find a perspective that is needed to correct it.

And same goes with your business. If you feel your business is an extension of yourself, then you're too emotionally involved, and you're not going to make the necessary changes to improve it. So first value process over outcome you can only control the process and the system and machine that you create to get the outcomes you want. Those outcomes cannot be controlled. If you do the process and the system well, you'll get the outcomes eventually to embrace a beginner mindset. You cannot know everything mastery of a subject takes decades. So do not expect to be right every time do not rely on past successes to expect future wins. That's not how life works.

Life has always a way of surprising us and flirt. Learn to see yourself from a slightly detached perspective. Think of yourself as someone that can be optimized to iterated just as the processes that you create in your business.

If you're having this bad habit, you get that this is how you eliminate it. If every time you're forced with this situation, that's a negative emotion that comes up learn to deal with that emotion to not identify with thoughts, emotions and behavior, because otherwise, you will never find the time and space to introduce the changes that are needed. So I hope this was useful. This is massive. If this happened to someone who had been decades in business wasn't registered business, it can happen to any one of us.

So I really hope you do not forget this lesson because there's a lot to win in never getting tripped up in those kinds of emotional reactions when things come crashing down.